Article Archive
Civil Affairs
The Nightmare Fundamental Transformation of American
2024 threatens to be year of unprecedented upheaval that will either finally expose the ghastly depth of the “transformation of America” sought by the radicals or end with the collapse of America as we once knew it, the revolutionists long-sought goal.
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Disinformation and Misinformation
The critical distinction between misinformation and disinformation is intent.
Disinformation is misinformation that is deliberately, knowingly, and intentionally spread for nefarious purposes.
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Fake News, Good News: Finding Truth in a World of Falsehood
Apart from Christ and the Gospel (Good News), truth will remain "fallen in the streets," justice will be turned back and righteousness nowhere to be seen.
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Restoring the Feminine Mystique
What ever happened to the feminine mystique? Feminism killed it, that’s what happened. The slow death of the feminine mystique began with the decidedly unfeminine author and activist Betty Friedan who coined the phrase and used it as the title of her 1963 landmark book. In it, she employed the term to describe the long-held supposed assumption that women could best find fulfillment through motherhood, homemaking, marriage, sexual passivity, and child rearing alone.
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Trump and the Art of Pragmatic Politics
The abortion issue is at the heart of winning or losing elections. In taking a poll-driven stance, Trump sadly has become a politician and no longer can claim to be a principle-driven statesman. Policy has become politicized for the purpose of winning back power.
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Imagining Utopia, Dying in Dreamland
Hope without a reasonable basis for its realization is, of course, not true hope. It is wishful thinking. It is sentimentality and romantic longing, nothing more. It is fancy at best and delusion at worst. It is utopianism, pure and simple.
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Leadership and De-centralization
What is really needed everywhere is a wholesale reorientation of the role of government and a renewed understanding of liberty in the hearts and minds of the American people all across the land. And this will come, by the grace of God, through a rebirth of wise and productive leadership.
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The nature and meaning of constitutions and the role of the judiciary in their interpretation.
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Today’s multiculturalist and xenophoric "Americans" deny that there is such a thing as a uniquely American worldview or at least that there should be such a thing. Yet their unflagging exertions to destroy the "citadel of our liberty and sovereignty" only prove that it exists or once did.
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Warm Thoughts on the Intolerant Hypocrisy of Moral Relativism
Moral relativists have painted themselves into an uncomfortable and potentially deadly corner, for no one can survive long in a world where all behaviors are acceptable, save a tiny handful of insipid comportments like hypocrisy which gain moral gravitas only by screeching about them.
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The Tenets of Just War Revisited
"War is, to say the least, a ghastly evil. I did not say, war is wrong. The waging of war is often highly necessary and even dutiful. For a sovereign state or federation of sovereign states the waging of war is oftentimes the only resort that remains, to guard the paths of justice, to promote the interests of God-given liberty and, paradoxical as it may seem, to conserve the blessings of true peace."
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Theology
Neo-Calvinism refuses to surrender ground that rightfully belongs to Christ, insisting instead that the Christian life is a holistic calling—one in which every sphere of existence must be brought into submission to the lordship of Jesus Christ.
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The Orphaned Attitude of Gratitude
What seems to be forgotten in our giving of thanks near the end of November annually is the direct object pronoun “you” in the sentence “Thank you.” And so, we are left with pious calls for a simplistic “Attitude of Gratitude.” ​A bare attitude of gratitude, however, is an orphaned outlook on life. It really is an empty emotive that focuses on the self, whereas true gratitude always has an object outside oneself—the giver of whatever gift has produced an attitude of gratitude.
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If we, in our anguish, do what Job restrained himself from doing—cursing God for His permission of evil and concluding that He is unjust with His creatures, we must understand the implications of our conclusion; namely, there is no other place to turn to for real salvation and comfort.
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The Making and Worshiping of Idols
The Second Commandment's prohibition against idolatry. There is a fundamental connection, though crucial difference, between the making and worshiping of images.
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There is a kind of empty faith rooted in human frailty (which is undeniable) and is therefore powerless to save or achieve anything to address the nagging suspicion that we are NOT OKAY.
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Ideas have consequences, a much-used adage points out. And words express ideas. That’s why we use words. We expect them to have meaning, and ofttimes we expect them to produce a response — of agreement or disagreement or action — on the part of the hearer.
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If God so arranges our circumstances in life that we are forced to arise in the face of evil and all its pernicious manifestations, we "must stand to our tackle" as God gives us "the spittle" to do so. In that case, we are given the right and the calling to clamor like champions. Always humbly. Always justly, i.e., always with righteous intent and with righteousness as our end purpose.
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Angels at Creation and Christmas
It is amazing to know that the hosts of heaven not only rejoiced and shouted in massive multitudes at the creation of all things, but also did so in proclaiming Messiah’s birth, the launch of the new creation. What would the sky have looked and sounded like during that proclamation? Well, whatever the case may have been, it was enough to make the shepherds “sore afraid.”
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Biblical teachings on Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage
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The Nature and Scope of the Sacraments
Examining the character of each of the Christian Rites of Baptism and The Lord's Supper.
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Whereas once on a Sabbath morn we happily donned our "Sunday best," many now found great moral virtue in coming to worship in the uniform garb of the counterculture — tattered jeans, holey T-shirts, dirty sneakers and even more weird trappings of the revolutionary times.
The reality and the nature of human existence after death is one of life’s greatest mysteries. Although the Bible makes the reality of existence after death clear, it has perplexed the generations of mankind concerning the nature of human existence beyond the grave, despite its lofty promises of bliss for the Redeemed and horrific threats for the unrepentant wicked.
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Women in Combat: Position Paper of Calaveras Presbyterian Church
Because of our awareness of God's distinction between the sexes and the expression of that distinction in the general application of divine declarations about mustering men to fight, Calaveras Presbyterian Church finds that the evidence of the Bible is to exempt women from being drafted into the military and from serving in military combat.
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Elsewhere
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In our day, we are too hospitable and not hospitable enough. Families lavish themselves with stuff, expending resources that could be used for the good of others. At the same time, Western nations often recklessly receive foreigners to the detriment of native populations, their peoplehood, and their cultural heritage. But God’s moral law demands that the heads of households and governments act according to the proper order of loves. Just as self-love is the precondition of loving others on an individual scale, on a collective level, loving your own first is the necessary condition for loving others well.
Is There Anything Left to Conserve?
Again: everything is religious. The only people who believe otherwise, in fact, are a few people in what we liked to call our “secular” corner of the world. We once thought that by abolishing religion we had got ahead of the rest of the world. But suddenly, this story is being told less confidently. The wind has changed, and secular liberal modernity no longer looks like a good bet for winner of the End of History board game.
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As we enter the brave new world of AI, we might consider what the Western tradition can teach us about the deepest issues raised by sophisticated machine-learning processes. And the most fundamental of these may be idolatry — a problem that, as the ancient Hebrews and Greeks understood, is political and psychological as well as theological.
The Quiet Right
The Quiet Right represents a key social shift. Its adherents believe that human life is not cultivated primarily in the abstract—through ideology, media, and technology—but in the flesh. They sense the danger of captured institutions and are determined to build viable alternatives, substitutes, and replacements.
The Thinnest Veneer of Civilization - Victor Davis Hanson
The once prosperous Greek city-state, Roman Empire, Renaissance republics, and European democracies of the 1930s imploded – as civilization went headlong in reverse. We in the modern Western world are now facing just such a crisis.
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The New Totalitarianism - Jan Jakielek and Masooma Haq
The world is now seeing a new form of totalitarianism, spawned in the last couple of decades and fostered by mass formation during the pandemic.
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Honoring the Sabbath - Alister Begg
Christ’s coming ushered in a rest that will last for all eternity. While we yet await its ultimate fulfillment, we already live with a taste.
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Does the Fourth Commandment Still Apply to Christians? - Andy Webb
The God we worship, is a God who desires to give his people rest. In a very real sense from beginning to end the Bible is the story of how God promises and then gives His people peace and true Sabbath rest.
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