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If you assume that Thanksgiving has been canceled this year, you might be forgiven. Wall-to-wall commercials for Black Friday began even earlier this year — some of them I heard as early as October. Let’s be clear: as a proponent of God’s moral law and, therefore, of free markets, I have no objection whatsoever to… Continue reading

First Things (FT) has launched a crusade to get pastors out of the marriage-ceremony-performing business, or, as they would no doubt prefer, out of the business of government-sanctioned marriage-ceremony performance. The problem for “The Marriage Pledge” they are pushing is that these two practices are identical. A dispute among allies FT is one of our… Continue reading

Perhaps the greatest and most pernicious sociopolitical myth of the last two centuries is that social predictions are a form of science (“social science”), that human behavior can be predicted like spaceship trajectories. This is a perennial Leftist myth that conservatives (especially political prognosticators) sometimes embrace. ESA just put a space probe on a comet… Continue reading

The chief task of political conservatives in a majority position in modern constitutional republics (like the new Republican Congress) is to impede the relentless progressive rush by (1) protecting the family and the church, (2) slowing the growth of government, and (3) restoring the rule of law. Politicians in such societies are not particularly important… Continue reading

Adapted from an introduction to the Center for Cultural Leadership‘s 2014 West Coast symposium on “Social Justice: A Christian View” in Saratoga, California, October 25 We’re talking today about social justice. “Social justice” has become ubiquitous in sociopolitical discourse. It’s what I like to term “Jell-O nomenclature”: its meaning is obvious until you actually have… Continue reading

Some of the most significant words written by a political conservative in the United States in the last quarter century are here, uttered not by a United States citizen, but by Canadian conservative Mark Steyn. He (finally?) understands that in a constitutional democracy, all of the political victories in the world cannot overturn a single… Continue reading

  In the current atmosphere of conservative Christian cultural engagement, the Center for Cultural Leadership stands squarely within the neo-Reformational (or neo-Calvinist) paradigm (most notably in the thinking of Abraham Kuyper, Herman Bavinck, Herman Dooyeweerd, and Cornelius Van Til, today championed also by John M. Frame). Its leading features with reference to culture are: The… Continue reading

  USA Today’s Christine Brennan chided the soft-spoken, retired-NFL-coach-turned-commentator, devout Christian Tony Dungy, for his comparatively benign comment that he would not have drafted the openly gay Michael Sam since he “wouldn’t want to deal with all of it [the controversy].” The unforgivable sin that Dungy and a number of his over-60-years-old crowd committed is,… Continue reading

In the far-from-Christian New York Times, Dexter Filkins discloses a fact emerging from the ISIS rampage in Syria and Iraq as horrifying in its own way as the images of rape, pillage, torture, crucifixions, and decapitations we are now accustomed to seeing every night on TV: evidence that ISIS fighters are less interested in political objectives… Continue reading

God created the world and all that’s in it (including man and woman, in his image) in six days and pronounced everything he’d made as “very good.”   Man and woman sinned under Satan’s temptation — breaking God’s heart and his law and eliciting his judgment and the pollution of the “very good” world.  … Continue reading

What I find most objectionable in Matt Chandler’s comments about the Ferguson, Missouri conflagration (literally) is his remarkably unverified and unverifiable statement that “white people, in most cases, have easier paths than most black people,” and, in particular the utter omission, if he is going that route, of addressing secular privilege, female privilege, Asian privilege, homosexual privilege,… Continue reading

You have, no doubt, heard the famous advice to speakers, writers and salesmen, expressed in the abbreviation KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. It’s good advice for speaking, writing and sales. But it’s bad advice for other activities. In fact, the bleating of sincere, moralistic souls for simplicity in modern life is often, by intent or… Continue reading

Until recent times, Christianity was a dominant force in the Western world. To one degree or another, and usually to a large degree, Christianity shaped the culture. By culture, I mean the external manifestations of the inward, guiding impulse of a society: its education, arts, politics, technology, economy, and so on. This impulse is always religious. Culture, in the words of… Continue reading

Read: 1 Kings 17:17–24 If you’ve ever visited Christian bookstores, you likely have seen bracelets or plaques or bumper stickers with the statement, “Prayer Changes Things.” For years I thought that statement was trite. After all, lots of these bookstore statements are trite: “God is my copilot,” “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven,” “Honk if you… Continue reading

  Absence of state coercion is not equivalent to political liberty.  Political liberty is possible only when there is a series of independent social institutions that check each other’s authority.  These institutions are communities.  Man cannot live without community (Gen. 2:18).  Aside from the Bible itself, perhaps no work in recent times has made that… Continue reading

Dear Friends and Supporters, CCL is gearing up to expand as at no time in our history. I need your prayer — fervent, unremitting, prayer. The new CCL contact data is here: P. O. Box 100 Coulterville, CA 95311 209-852-4438 If you donate to CCL via direct checks from your bank, please make the change… Continue reading

Read:   Jer. 6:16 a, b; Prov. 22:28 Introduction Jeremiah’s time was eerily similar to ours. God’s people had turned away from him. They’d turned to idolatry and fornication. They were imitating the worldly, pagan practices surrounding them. They were mistreating one another, cheating one another. The politicians cared nothing for God’s truth. Even the priests… Continue reading

  Read:  Rom. 8:14­–17; Ps. 103:13–14; Mt. 7:7–11 Introduction I’m ambivalent whenever I hear the popular expression “Christ-centered.” It’s understandable why we’d use it. Jesus the Christ died for our sins and rose (1 Cor. 15:1f.). He’s the exact imprint of God to man (Heb. 1:3). He’s King of kings and Lord of lords (Rev.… Continue reading

Andrew, I’m curious what you think of Wright’s critique of inerrantism (if that’s a word) as a product of “modernist rationalism”? I do believe that American evangelicalism is very strongly formed by the philosophical foundations of modernist thought in Descartes and others, so in trying to disentangle our theology from these not-so-biblical ways of thinking,… Continue reading

It’s not surprising that we live in an age of liturgical renewal, because the stripped-down minimalism of modernity as expressed in liturgy has created a vacuum into which the superficialities and inanities and, in the case of some liberal churches, downright demons (like Lutheran goddess worship), have rushed. Liturgies are good, bad, or mediocre, but… Continue reading