• Here’s a reminder of why religious instruction has no place in public education. If you support prayer in school, this is the kind of thing you’re supporting.
• Matt Young on “The Pledge of Allegiance: Two Reasons Why Christians Should Not Say It.” Good Anabaptist reasoning there, and a killer proof-text for those who ascribe to proof-texts. (“Do not swear at all” pretty much categorically rules out any “pledge of allegiance” for Christians. Alas, though, this proof-text is from the Sermon on the Mount — and everyone knows that passage never counts as a literal, inerrant or authoritative proof-text.) Here, again, is a third reason for Christians to avoid the recitation of this loyalty oath: It’s creepy, creepy, creepy.
• Ari Kohen highlights this quote from a Jewish community leader in Brussels, after an attacker fatally shot three people at Belgium’s Jewish Museum: “The assumption, and it is an assumption, is that it was someone who didn’t try to target the museum but the adjective ‘Jewish.'”
Kohen adds: “If you ever find yourself thinking that an attack that took place at a Jewish anything — museum, school, place of worship, community center, cemetery, whatever — is just random violence, I’m going to let you know that you’re wrong and that you haven’t been paying sufficient attention to the world around you for many, many years.”
And, in the wake of this weekend’s deadly terror spree in Santa Barbara, let’s also add this: If you ever find yourself thinking that an attack that took place against women — #yesallwomen — is just random violence, then you’re wrong and you haven’t been paying sufficient attention to the world around you for many, many years.
• One difference between the rich and the poor is this: The rich want more money so that they can get more stuff; the poor want more money so that they don’t lose everything they have. The former can correctly be called greed, but that doesn’t seem like an accurate word for the poor person’s desperation for some respite from the reasonable fear that, at any moment, powerful creditors may take away everything they need to live. Point begin, again: Jubilee.
• Medical research aims to make the world a better place (click on Xavier McDaniel for link, full context is here for those who don’t remember Singles):
• I’d never heard of “Cathedral Bible College” in South Carolina, but I wouldn’t recommend attending there. It seems to have been a predatory scam run by a guy named Reginald Wayne Miller to lure foreign students with the promise of an education before trapping them in indentured servitude. Miller has been arrested and charged with “forced labor” — or, in other words, slavery.
Luring foreign nationals to this country and then forcing them to work for pennies a day is illegal. Well, it’s illegal unless you’re a private prison operator under contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to “detain” undocumented immigrants and force them to work for wages near or below what Miller was “paying” the poor students trapped at Cathedral Bible College.
• Peter Enns on “Tullian Tchividjian, The Gospel Coalition, and a (rather obvious) theology problem“:
“Theology is not to blame here.” Yes it is Tullian. Yes it most definitely is. On two related levels.
First, the resurgence of Reformed theology in American evangelicalism and fundamentalism – commonly referred to as the Neo-Reformed movement – is a belligerent movement. This is why it exists – to correct others, not to turn the spotlight inward. There are exceptions within, of course, and I am by no means suggesting everyone who sees him or herself as part of this movement exhibits this tendency. But the “system” is set up to fight. It’s what they do.
So don’t be shocked, Tullian, if it happens to you. Yesterday’s heroes can quickly become tomorrow’s vanquished foes. When “contending for the gospel” is your center of gravity, there’s always a foe. There has to be.
Second, theology proper is to blame here – ”theology” as in how we understand God. …
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