In education, the words secular, government, and public are not synonymous with neutrality. A public school is every bit as enmeshed in a system of ardently held, worldview-shaping religio-philosophical underpinnings as any religious school out there. It is not neutral because it is not possible to be neutral. The claim that every school is intrinsically... Continue Reading

Presbyteries, as an institution of the covenant of grace, do well to remember the limits of their competence and authority and to remember the Christian liberty of their members to disagree with the cultural, poltical, social, and economic opinions of her ministers and ruling elders.   According to the PCA’s denominational magazine, By Faith, the Potomac Presbytery... Continue Reading

Despite reiterating, in case after case, that the Constitution demands government neutrality toward religion, the Court has stubbornly failed to clear away an undergrowth of older precedents that arguably suggest the opposite. Bureaucrats and judges alike cling to these outdated precedents, using them to mask their confusion, ignorance, or outright animus toward religious believers and... Continue Reading

If God has not been gagged, and if the Spirit has been at work in the history of the church, let us not relegate and relativize the greatest theologians, preachers, and practitioners of the past based on our twenty-first century obsessions with race, gender, and sexuality. Texts have meanings (Matthew 9:12-13), and teachers are given... Continue Reading

The leak of an entire draft opinion in the middle of deliberations in a vitally important case suggests…a desire either to bully or destroy the Court as an effective institution. After this episode, justices will feel less secure about the confidentiality of their deliberations and think twice about what they put in drafts. The work... Continue Reading

MacIntyre discusses why “managerialism” cannot provide a proper framework for a flourishing society: the idea of managerial effectiveness is dangerous fiction that will lead to social collapse.   Many of those who express concern for the current condition of our society, as well as the trajectory it is on, tend to pour a lot of... Continue Reading

You have freedom over your body, so long as your freedom does not impinge upon the rights of another human life. When it does, and the murder of an innocent human life in the womb (again, that is a scientific fact of genetics) certainly qualifies, then your rights must be limited, to protect the rights... Continue Reading

What does this have to do with the winsome, third way framework? Well, as I argued in my piece, it seems to me that this framework tends to think about politics through the lens of evangelism, and thus in an apologetic mode. This gets expressed in the overwrought concern with how Christians are perceived by... Continue Reading

While enrapt in the progress of this mystery, I was suddenly jolted by a common misunderstanding of many relating to the need for conversion and what it means to be a Christian. Augustine of Canterbury may have been born an Anglican, but he could not be born a Christian. One may be born a Muslim,... Continue Reading

Commentaries are crucial when it comes to properly understanding a text. Preachers rightly spend a good bit of their prep time learning from experts through their commentaries. But there aren’t many occasions when the preacher should quote these experts. To read a quote from a commentary, and especially at length, is to radically change the... Continue Reading