Category Archives: Education

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Sunday Sermon Taboo: Politics

Stuff we ought to talk about in church but don't

The election of President Trump, as well as rightward movements in Europe, are prompting US conservatives to speak of the death of socialism. This is abject blindness. It is socialists that are being rejected, not socialism.

America has already embraced socialism in the forms of public education, social security, and even healthcare, where we choose between the socialism of Obamacare on the Left and the socialism-lite of Trumpcare on the faux-Right. Our President is a pragmatic populist, not a principled conservative. Hence, when he ran for office he named conservatives to his cabinet because his base wanted them, but once in office has embraced socialism in healthcare because the electorate at large wants it. As for the philosophical differences between the two, they don’t matter to a self-styled dealmaker-in-chief.

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Six Ways to Make the Bible Make Sense

No theologians were harmed in the writing of this column

There’s no point in hinting around. Studying the Bible isn’t optional, but most Christians find it taxing to establish a routine. Consequently, they either restrict their time in God’s Word to some little promise book, or they just put it off altogether. Naturally, the promise book is good, but it no more substitutes for serious reading than a donut and coffee take the place of a balanced meal. How can the Holy Spirit guide us into “all truth” if we just consider truth a snack food?

We’re a generation that has grown up on websites, magazines, tv, movies and 12-minute YouTube shows, so we find it difficult to read more than a chapter or two in a sitting … or a week … or a month. Frankly, a lot of us just won’t read anything unless it’s published twelve times a year in color or easy to find on Google. But don’t be depressed. There are understandable reasons why you don’t read your Bible like you should. If you’re the typical Christian:

  • You read the Scriptures for “spiritual guidance” rather than practical instruction.
  • No matter how much you read, you just don’t understand a lot of it.
  • You have no idea how much Bible knowledge is “enough,” so you’re defeated right out of the gate.

The important thing is to get into Scripture as a manual for living, not just to find “proof-texts” for defending your faith. So, to that end here are six rules—I don’t really like the word “rules,” but we’ll use it—that will help you to see the Scriptures as the practical guide it was meant to be.

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Who are these Guys?

Meet the authors and hosts of The Worldview Course

(A post in which James toots his own horn, and thereby blows it)

Polar opposites in virtually every way except their common consecration to God and his Word, Mark Nauroth and James Gilbert, aka The Worldview Guys, are as unlikely a combination as waffles and fried chicken. In other words, bring these two together and things just work, especially when they’re writing, podcasting or hosting their brand new venture, The Worldview Course.

Ask the young millennial from California and the…uh, “older gentleman” from Florida why they’ve joined forces to become the “Guys” and you’ll get a single answer: “We’re out to win the culture, not the culture war.”

“The Worldview Course is a 13-session video series we wrote and cohosted for a target audience that includes both small groups and families,” explains Mark. We purposely staged it like a giant Apple commercial, and gave the whole project a fun and slightly irreverent tone.”

The course includes both DVD and online video, a sleek 145-page study guide with wide margins for journaling, online testing and more. “We’re both communicators: a writer and a web designer,” says James, “and we share a passion to connect the dots between God’s word and John Q. Public’s world.”

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Humanism Goes to School

How "free" turned out to be so expensive

Early in the fight for America’s soul, rationalists emerged from within the ranks of the Congregationalist churches in New England where, in no small part as a reaction to the stirrings of what would become America’s Second Great Awakening, they began to propound “Unitarianism,” a heresy as old as the Reformation itself. Unitarians saw man as inherently good, Jesus as strictly human, Satan as non-existent and God as a hands-off Creator. Evil was attributable to a lack of education and opportunity (sound familiar?) thus rendering sin the playing out of ignorance and repression. Give a man enough information, their reasoning went, and his natural inclination must be to better himself and his world around him.

Information plus opportunity equals paradise. It was an idea as old as the seduction of Eve, and it proved as powerful, especially around Boston. By the early nineteenth century the new world’s first Congregational church had bitten the apple to become America’s first Unitarian church.

While the evangelists of both Awakenings had drawn thousands to arbors and altars where tears of repentance were emphasized, these humanist forebears quietly set their sights on key areas of society like economics, civil government, and especially education.