April 26th, 2010 §
Beautifully said.
This observation and experience, which has intensified over the past ten years of my life, may explain why I have gone from being an educational entrepreneur and desiring to move my family to greener pastures where the external culture at least appears better, to being a homeschool advocate who desires nothing more than for his children and grandchildren to marry fellow believers and settle down near one another, where they can contribute and partake of the blessed heat generated in this crucible of the extended Christian family living under the cross in the forgiveness of Christ.
via Lutherans and Procreation: The Crucible of the (Extended) Christian Family.
April 20th, 2010 §
I urge you to read this recent article in First Things on the economic and social effect of contraception. The author analyzes the effects of the pill through the sciences. The conclusions might surprise you. From Bitter Pill | First Things:
If the arguments above are true, why do women agree to use contraception? More pointedly, why are so many women so vocal that contraception is a necessity—indeed, that it is their birthright?
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April 6th, 2010 §
“As hellfire receded, there advanced the literal fires of the crematorium.”
So writes Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch in the concluding chapter of his massive Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. The history ends with a chapter on “culture wars,” the ways Christianity is experiencing change and tumult as it enters the twenty-first century. In the conclusion, MacCulloch traces out many of the controversies one might expect: from the challenges to Orthodoxy in a post-Soviet world to the Anglican sexual debates to the American fights over abortion and secularism and liberalism.
One of the primary changes in Christianity the historian sees, however, would probably surprise most Americans as being a “culture war” issue at all: cremation and burial.
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March 22nd, 2010 §
March 11th, 2010 §
I’ll spare you the gory details. Click the link if you really want to know what was in this document. I didn’t.
The World Association of Girl Scouts and Girl Guides hosted a no-adults-welcome panel at the United Nations this week where Planned Parenthood was allowed to distribute a brochure entitled “Healthy, Happy and Hot.” The event was part of the annual United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) which concludes this week.
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March 8th, 2010 §
IMAGINE you are one half of a young couple expecting your first child in a fast-growing, poor country. You are part of the new middle class; your income is rising; you want a small family. But traditional mores hold sway around you, most important in the preference for sons over daughters. Perhaps hard physical labour is still needed for the family to make its living. Perhaps only sons may inherit land. Perhaps a daughter is deemed to join another family on marriage and you want someone to care for you when you are old. Perhaps she needs a dowry.
Now imagine that you have had an ultrasound scan; it costs $12, but you can afford that. The scan says the unborn child is a girl. You yourself would prefer a boy; the rest of your family clamours for one. You would never dream of killing a baby daughter, as they do out in the villages. But an abortion seems different. What do you do?
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February 10th, 2010 §
Everyone knows we live on an overpopulated planet. Too many people (carbon footprints) harm our environment, causing global climate change, a threat to us all. In addition, increasing population means more poverty and starvation. Responsible adults must limit their family size.
What I just wrote is nonsense, of course, but is religion to environmentalists and accepted by many if not most Americans. In spite of such bleak pronouncements, abundant space remains in and on this world for more people. The sun controls our weather more than we thought. Carbon dioxide helps plants grow. Denmark and Japan, two densely populated countries, experience remarkable prosperity in spite of (because of?) their many citizens. Dishonesty, graft, greed, and corruption seem to contribute more to poverty and starvation in developing countries than anything else.
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December 10th, 2009 §
November 12th, 2009 §
I stumbled on this terrific quote from Luther on marriage (context is Genesis 24:1-4) File this in the “some things never change” category:
Moreover, especially the dignity of matrimony should impel us to give instruction concerning matrimony in a sober and godly manner. For marriage is not a trifling matter; but it is the most serious and most important matter in the whole world, because it is the source of human society and of the human race. Life in its entirety has nothing that excels it in worth. Therefore one should discuss it with the utmost piety and on the basis of the weightiest arguments and reasons. For in other circumstances it has been dishonored enough by concupiscence of the flesh and by lust.
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October 19th, 2009 §
Concerning the eternity of God is in his faithfulness, manifest in words and action.
Robert Jenson writes, “the identity of Israel’s God, his difference from other gods, is precisely that Israel’s God is not eternal in the way other gods are, not God in the same way. That the past guarantees the future is exactly the deity of the gods, but Yahweh always challenges the past and everything guaranteed by it [including, Jenson points out, the past of His own people], from a future that is freedom. . . . Yahweh is eternal [in that] He is faithful.”
Israel needed no grounding in a mythic past, an unalterable tradition, in any notions of fixed substances to guarantee a future. Israel was instead grounded in midair by the reliable Word of Yahweh, whose continuity was not that of sameness through time but a “personal” continuity of His “words and commitments, by the faithfulness of later acts to the promises made in Yahweh’s earlier acts.”
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