“Honor your father and mother... that your days may be long, and that it may go well with you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” Few things seem more American than rebelling against authority. After all, that’s how we started as a country, right? Leaving aside lengthy historical and...

“Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy...Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.” — Deut. 5:12-14 “If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.” If you’ve ever heard that maddening one-liner, you may have spent some time in...

“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” If ‘90s trends are truly back, it’s about time we dusted off the W.W.J.D. bracelets—the Evangelical craze that attempted to stamp into teenage minds the importance of imitating Jesus. What would Jesus do? Usually it turned out that He...

“You shall not make for yourself an image…” Don’t be a "person of faith." It’s a meaningless statement, like saying “I like food” or “I like to sleep.” Be a person who admits he doesn’t know what he believes, or a devout Buddhist or Muslim. Then, at least, you stand in well-defined ignorance or...

What use are the Ten Commandments today? Last time we looked at the First Commandment as it specifically relates to the Church; now we’ll consider it with respect to the world in general. As it appears in the Bible, the term “world” could mean a couple things. In some places it means the wide,...

We are rounding the curve into the reckoning phase. When disaster strikes, people (or communities, or nations) often move through three stages: crisis triage, reckoning/ regrouping, and finally redirecting. Crisis triage looks like keeping the ship afloat and surviving till tomorrow. Shell-shocked...

What would a world without forgiveness look like? We could expect constant wars, fighting, and conflict. We would witness the dissolution of marriage, family, and all but the most casual friendships. Court systems would clog. Everyone would seek to live and work alone. We would settle and adopt a...

One pandemic leads to another. Because our lives are never compartmentalized, we can expect that the effects of a global epidemic will not be limited to the metrics of active cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. We know that natural disasters, such as hurricanes and wildfires, have far more wide-...

If someone says to you, “The solution to poverty is...,” and finishes that sentence with a single word, or a single phrase that doesn’t include ‘Jesus,’ then it's probably safe to stop listening. Our hunger for tweet-length solutions, for snackable, bite-sized redemption plans has collapsed our...

Among the thinning list of vices still capable of generating unilateral moral outrage, bigotry has remained near the top. And for good reason. Bigotry involves the judging, excluding, discriminating, and oppressing of a human being made in God’s image. The seed of bigotry grows in the soil of...

Every so often, atrocities rise to the level of global attention in a way that triggers and disturbs our conscience, and evokes a collective outcry of “No! This isn’t right! This needs to stop.” These instances are sadly rare, not in the sense that the atrocities are rare—they are not—but rare in...

Last month, the Atlantic published a provocative and fascinating article which, given its title, could not have come at a more poignantly ironic moment: “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake” . The article classifies the American obsession with nuclear families as a chronological aberration of the...

Postmodernism has produced an heir, and its name is Consensus. Four years ago, the Oxford Dictionary announced that “post-truth” was its word of the year. Post-truth refers to our contemporary sense of justice, in which objective reality and facts bow the knee to personal emotions and beliefs. Ravi...

Has free speech ever really been free? The growth spurt of ‘safe spaces’, the label of ‘hate speech’, and the push back against speech-induced violence have created a reactionary surge in America to protect our 1 st amendment rights. While the goal of safeguarding open...

Aren’t you due for a fresh round of evangelism penance? Chances are your church is already offering a healthy assortment of channels through which you can merit some level of atonement for your recent oversight in this area. You could at least take a minute out of your day to savor, like a...