Too Hot to Handle: Abandoning Ship

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Men have always done it mid-life — some men, anyway, though thankfully Christian men did it somewhat more rarely.

We met the “right” waitress, secretary, serving wench or married woman bathing on a rooftop and bailed on our wives and families. We did it to find happiness (or at least firmer skin or, for a time at least, a cheerier disposition). We did it to demonstrate we were still virile and desirable. Or we did it for some other perfectly scrutable male reason that we wholeheartedly believed was unique to our own experience.

Tom: It took them a while to catch up, Immanuel Can, but thanks to feminism’s influence, women are doing it too, and they’re doing it with a vengeance. Almost 70% of divorces are now initiated by unhappy wives.

My Sheep

“My sheep listen to my voice, and I know them …”

“I know them.”

It’s funny … wouldn’t you expect the Lord to have said, “My sheep listen to my voice and they know me”?

That would be parallelism. That would be equivalent. That would speak of our recognition of the Good Shepherd, just as the first part of the verse emphasizes it. We know his voice, and we know him.

But it’s not that.

Failure to Choose is a Choice Too

The other day I came across a paperback a few years old credited to a number of generally reputable authors and entitled Hard Sayings of the Bible.

Why not? There are more than a few commonly misunderstood or genuinely obscure sayings in scripture to work with, perhaps even enough to fill a decent-sized book.

But I wonder if we don’t make some sayings harder than they should be.

Some Christians tend to mistake indecisiveness for graciousness. Thus a waffling, cover-all-the-bases interpretive position may be thought humble when it is merely uncommitted. A failure to point out the logical fallacies on the other side of a scriptural question may seem charitable when it is merely cowardly.

Progressive Revelation and Paradigm Shifts

Seismic enough for you?

Whenever I come across an overly-technical explanation of some phenomenon in Christendom, I like to try to restate it for myself in plain English before I decide whether it makes any sense.

On that note, if you haven’t heard of them, the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance (OCRT) have set themselves the task of reducing bigotry by exposing religious people to information about other religions.

A worthy undertaking. Perhaps.

Anonymous Asks (132)

“Why is the Bible so violent?”

On one level the answer to this is fairly obvious: any work that accurately documents human history or tells a believable tale of any length and scope about us will invariably involve violence unless it is highly censored or terribly dishonest. Julius Caesar is violent too, as is Macbeth, Moby Dick and even To Kill a Mockingbird.

So the Bible is violent because people are violent.

Forgive or Die

“I can’t forgive him,” the young man told his counselor.

Understandable, I think. I don’t know all the details, but it seems the speaker has been quite horribly mistreated and cannot bring himself to feel forgiving toward the person who has hurt him so badly. He simply can’t let it go.

More significant is the young man’s concern for his own soul, since he has read the very words of the Lord Jesus himself and has concluded that if he cannot feel forgiveness toward this individual who has had such a negative effect on his life, then he cannot be saved.

And “forgive or die” is a pretty scary ultimatum to face when your feelings won’t play along with what your Christian friends are telling you is the right thing to do.

Mining the Minors: Amos (2)

Any map of the Middle East from the time of the prophet Amos, including this one (if you want something larger than the map to the right), shows an interesting feature of the judgment of nations we read about in chapters 1 and 2.

The six Gentile nations — and all eight nations against which Amos prophesied, including God’s own people in Israel and Judah — are not chosen willy-nilly from here, there and everywhere in the Middle East; rather, they comprise a contiguous geographic region of over 50,000 square kilometers. Israel sits dead center in this region, while Judah abuts it on the south, Ammon on the east, Moab on the southeast, Philistia on the southwest, Phoenicia (Tyre) on the northwest, and Damascus (southern Syria) on the north. Only Edom does not have a common border with Israel, and it has common borders with both Judah and Moab.

This suggests that rather than a series of separate judgments, we are considering a single massive, transformative event that affected every one of these nations to differing degrees.

Too Hot to Handle: Performance-Church

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tom: You sent me a horrible parody of a contemporary evangelical church service, IC. You’ve got to know I couldn’t leave that alone. I’m still brushing my teeth to get the taste out of my mouth.

But when they’re snarking the modern eleven o’clock church meeting on YouTube, and especially when it looks horribly familiar to most of your audience, you’ve almost got to concede we evangelicals are done like dinner. And it appears we cooked ourselves.

Does this travesty seem familiar to you?

Immanuel Can: You seem more shocked about it than I. There’s a reason why the piece is funny so many people; it’s recognition. The jokes reflect the current reality of many, many evangelical-type churches.

Time to Face the Music

Did you know that some famous pop songs are about to go bottoms-up?

Yep, it’s true. Our culture has changed so rapidly in the last couple of decades that some tunes simply don’t make sense anymore.

Back in the ’70s we had Jim Croce’s “Operator”. We don’t even know what one of those is today. A little later, we had Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” and the Boomtown Rats’ lyrical reference to a telex machine. (Now, there’s an obscure one!) More recently, we stepped up to Maroon 5’s “Payphone”, or Brand New’s “Mixtape” (apparently not so brand new after all). Or what about all the references to pagers and beepers in ’90s rap songs? Gone and forgotten.

Enemy Territory

This is not our world.

It hasn’t been ours since the garden of Eden and it’s not ours today. It is the dominion of the “god of this age”, the “prince of the power of the air”, the “ruler of this world”.

That explains so much, when you really think about it.

We live in enemy territory, like Frodo in Mordor without the obvious orcs and spiders. Oh, there are plenty of both here, but they come well disguised. They don’t even drip acid when they speak — unless you pay very close attention.

The Dignity of Causality

A few days ago, I stopped on my way to work to talk to a homeless man. His name is Rick, and he’s a fascinating character, all smiles and cheer as he sits for hours at a time on a downtown side-street air vent pumping out lifesaving heat in the sub-zero February chill. He’ll gratefully take your money if you offer it, but he doesn’t do the traditional begging thing. At night, he bikes up to the courthouse, where there are nearly 100 CCTV cameras, so that he can sleep without fear of being robbed … or worse.

He’s been at it for three and a half years.

Anonymous Asks (131)

“Was Jesus really a Jew?”

If you have been a mainstream evangelical Christian most of your life and are even slightly familiar with the scriptures, this may seem like a ridiculous question with an answer so obvious it is unworthy of serious attention. And yet you might be surprised to find how many people who call themselves Christians would answer it in the negative, often quite fiercely.

Sometimes a ridiculous question is not so ridiculous when you understand where it is coming from. At very least it is not ridiculous to the person asking it.

So does the “Jesus was not a Jew” argument have any merit? Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by “a Jew”.

The Ironic Ending

Not all friendships get off on the right foot.

One of my best buddies in high school was a skinny longhair with similar tastes in pop music. But Terry and I met under less than ideal circumstances. Another student had a serious grudge against me and was determined to make my early high school life as miserable as possible; however, he wasn’t quite sure he had it in him to handle a six foot 200 pounder on his own. So, one day after school, he and his hulking sidekick chased me into the nearby woods. On the way, they drafted Terry to help out.

Mining the Minors: Amos (1)

G.J. Wenham suggests the nomadic lifestyle of the shepherd tended to foster mistrust in ancient societies, as plausible an explanation as any other for the low estimation of the profession in the eyes of the elite. But though the Egyptians disparaged herdsmen, God uses the term as a compliment, and he called some of the greatest men in Israel’s history from among the flock.

Too Hot to Handle: He Made Them Male and Female

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Immanuel Can: Ordinarily I let you throw out the first pitch, Tom, but let me hurl the first fastball today. The wind-up’s a bit long, but I think it’s worth it for the amount of heat we stand to generate.

Tom: Deal.

IC: Psychologist Paul Vitz (a Catholic) has a book, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism (2013), and in it he says some very provocative things. In context, he’s been writing about how atheism and the experience of bad, abusive, weak and absentee male parenting (fatherhood) are psychologically correlated. He turns to considering the reasons why men and women tend to experience the effects of ill-fathering in a somewhat different way.

Horrific Hymnology

A year or so ago I wrote three posts on music (you can find them here, here and here). My point — then and now — was that we all have a responsibility to be discerning and to choose our music based on biblical principles rather than personal preference. And so that I would not be taking that responsibility away from anyone, I talked about the key principles rather than particulars of which musical pieces might be indicted or approved by a discerning observer.

Moreover, if anyone did not agree with me about their selections for congregational singing, I did not want to pass any judgment on them. After all, we all stand or fall to our own Master. So if the hymns and songs somebody else’s congregation wants to sing don’t square with the sort of list I would choose, I say, “No hard feelings.” I am not the last word in musical orthodoxy.

Ezekiel and the Future of Palestine

To whom does Palestine really belong?

The student of history encounters arguments for both sides, most of which transparently serve the agendas of their writers and pass themselves off as factual while trading largely on sentiment. But any careful reader of scripture understands that the Jewish claim to the land of Palestine goes back a whole lot further than May 15, 1948.

Having been unilaterally gifted the land then called Canaan via God’s covenant with their forefather Abraham around 2000 BC, Israel has spent more time in exile from the land of promise than actually living there.

It Ain’t Personal

Spiritual leadership is not easy.

Perhaps that’s part of the reason so few Christians seem to seek it, especially these days. But unless we opt out of family life and church life entirely, most of us are faced with a certain amount of responsibility, like it or not.

Elders are leaders. And in fact every Bible teacher, formal or otherwise, leads too. The act of writing down or publicly giving voice to a spiritual conviction is invariably an act of leadership that declares, “This way, not that way” or at least “This means X, it doesn’t mean Y”, no matter how delicately or deferentially one chooses to formulate one’s opinion. In addition, all mothers and fathers lead their children, or else their lives quickly devolve into an endless series of rather potent miseries.

Anonymous Asks (130)

“Should children be told Santa is fake?”

We can probably include the tooth fairy in this conversation as well. I think it’s fairly clear that if you pick up a Hebrew or Greek concordance, you will have great difficulty locating an equivalent for either “Santa” or “fairy”. The Bible does not address such questions directly.

So, I am trying to think back to my own childhood in a Christian home, asking myself how my parents handled this ...

Nothing New Under the Sun

If the shifting political and social narratives of the last several years have not convinced you that the vast majority of the general public are being lied to deliberately and repeatedly, then probably nothing will.

For myself, I am convinced that no matter the subject, just about the only story that isn’t accurate in any given news cycle is the one being told to us by politicians, corporations and media; the one which is said to be most popularly acceptable, and the one its authors are at greatest pains to preserve by censoring any contradictory information or expression of opinion that might make it less persuasive.

Mining the Minors: Jonah (19)

In the last five months I have written slightly under 26,000 words and 19 blog posts about the book of Jonah. That’s less than many, but more than most. Needless to say, I take the story of the rebel Israelite prophet very seriously indeed. Jesus viewed it as historical, and that seems to me the way it ought to be regarded.

Nowadays we are being told Jonah is actually a comedy. My idea of comedy basically begins and ends with Dick Van Dyke and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Jonah most definitely is not in that vein at all.

So did I miss the boat, so to speak? Is laughter really the best medicine? While the view of Jonah as satire, parody or farce is not common in the churches in which I normally circulate, a few liberal Bible scholars with degrees and big reputations have written to that effect, and we should probably take at least take a few paragraphs to consider their position.

Too Hot to Handle: Abandoning Evangelicalism

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Rachel Held Evans, who is post-evangelical herself, documents dissatisfaction among those she calls “defenders of the marginalized” in U.S. evangelical churches. In some quarters, it appears, the fact that so many of their fellow pew-occupiers voted for Donald Trump is not going down well.

Brandi Miller tweets, “I drafted my divorce papers with evangelicalism a long time ago. Tonight I serve them.” Glennon Melton asks, “Does a Love Warrior Go? YES. If that’s what her deepest wisdom tells her to do.”

Tom: What do you think, Immanuel Can? Imagine your fellow churchgoers voted for an immoral, bigoted incompetent with no regard for the dignity of women, as Rachel so delicately puts it. Something worth leaving your church over?

The Big Gamble

When I first entered my profession, I was in my mid-twenties. As a brash young man, I remember being irritated by the requirement that I should begin to save for retirement. For one thing, I was young, and young people never think much about being old. I thought I might well even be dead long before my investment came back; I certainly had no assurances I would not. But more importantly, as I was starting out in life, I knew I could make good use of that sizeable portion of my income that was going to be carved out for the retirement plan, and there was no way to get at it.

I would have if I could have.

You Worship WHAT?

What do you think: worth dying for?

This is interesting.

Debate.org asked the following question: “If there is a god, does that being necessarily deserve worship?”

Get this: 73% said no. Are you surprised?

Probably not. But ignorant as it may be, perhaps the logic and underlying assumptions of the “no” brigade are worth a moment’s consideration.

Binary Thinking

How we choose to express disagreement is often more important than what we are disagreeing about in the first place.

Some folks have a tendency to take aim at the most ridiculous, transparently caricatured representation of the side they oppose. I used to put it down to straw-manning. I considered people who argued this way manipulative and calculating.

Now I wonder.

Anonymous Asks (129)

“What’s the difference between encouragement and flattery?”

Years ago, I got together for coffee with an elder from a church where I had enjoyed happy fellowship for several years. This was not the first time and it wouldn’t be the last; he is one of those godly older men who takes the job of shepherding very seriously indeed, and he kept track of me long after I had moved out of town and was no longer, strictly speaking, his “spiritual business”.

I had worn a particularly goofy, juvenile T-shirt to the coffee shop, and as we sat down together, he shot me a wry grin and asked, “So, when are you going to grow up?”

That was encouragement. It sure wasn’t flattery.

A Built-In Self-Destruct Button

If you have spent a lot of time reading the Old Testament and trying to get into the mindset of the average law-abiding Jew, you probably agree with me that Christian freedom is a marvelous thing.

The believer’s relationship to the Law of Moses is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Christian life, notwithstanding statements like “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” and “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”

But freedom is not something we human beings do easily or naturally. We prefer rule-keeping.

Mining the Minors: Jonah (18)

When God gives a mission to one of his servants, there is always more than one thing going on. He is not just sending a message or getting a job done, but also teaching his most faithful followers more about himself.

We should expect this. He is God, after all. If anyone is equipped to play multi-dimensional chess, it is the Divine Mind.

Too Hot to Handle: Getting Reoriented

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tertius drew my attention to this three-year-old blog post written by a self-described “twenty-something Christ follower” who says he is “same-sex attracted”.

That makes him a member of a small but disproportionately influential group. Infogalactic has this survey of the various attempts made to measure the demographics of sexual orientation. The numbers are all over the place, but nowhere do they exceed 5% of the population.

Zombie Church

I’ve always really liked Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, “Cloister Graveyard in the Snow”. In it, we see a crumbled cathedral with only a bit of the porch and chapel remaining amid twisted, dark trees. But if you look closely, in the middle ground, you’ll see a trail of monks still marching into the ruins, presumably to continue their monkish duties.

The painting has both a positive and a negative message about religiosity. On the one hand, it suggests faith can persist even when, socially speaking, religiosity is generally perceived be in ruins; but on the other hand, it also reminds us that ritual can persist even when the life of a church is gone.

I guess the message you take depends on the perspective with which you view it.

Creating Cognitive Dissonance

A little over a week ago, I was watching one of those bog-standard political videos you find on YouTube these days: you know, the ones where a conservative interviews a group of young Leftists without revealing his own political leanings. He asks each interviewee a series of apparently random questions about what they believe, after which the results are cleverly edited together to demonstrate the rank hypocrisy of Progressivist thinking.

In this case the subjects being discussed were tolerance and compromise, and the results were absolutely predictable. Every young Lefty being interviewed claimed tolerance was the most important of all values and that compromise was critical when engaging in political discourse, but of course the moment they were given a list of specific conservative values and areas of possible agreement with the Right, it turned out they were all hopelessly intolerant and refused to compromise on anything at all.

“Aha!” said the conservative writers and editors. “Hypocrisy!” Well, no. Not exactly.

Not Her Voice

Everybody wants to be heard. That’s understandable.

To understand and be fully understood is one of the greatest possible states to which human beings may aspire. When perfection comes, “I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known,” says the apostle.

That suggests very strongly that those of us who have a relationship with Jesus Christ are already as fully known as we will ever need or want to be. Think about that for a bit.

Anonymous Asks (128)

“Should God choose our mate?”

That’s an interesting question, and I think the answer may have a bit of both yes and no in it. Obvious comeback: If he did, how would you know? What would that look like? What evidence would you need to feel confident God had stepped into your personal circumstances and ordered your future living arrangements?

There are definitely Christians who think this is precisely what happens; perhaps not in every case, but at least in those where a man commits his way to the Lord in prayer, or a woman seeks God’s will for her in the matter of marriage. I will not argue with anyone who feels that way, but again, that’s all it is: a feeling.

Unless of course you can produce evidence ...

Too Clever For Their Own Good

Far too often the mere existence of a biblical record of how fallible, sinful men behave is taken as evidence of what God prefers.

That’s a mistake, whether it is done by unbelievers attacking the character of God and the morality of his instructions, or by believers looking to the frequently sub-optimal choices of Old Testament patriarchs for their standards of acceptable Christian behavior.

We can and should learn moral lessons from history, of course, but it is foolish to go beyond what is actually written. When we do, we are often being too clever for our own good.

Mining the Minors: Jonah (17)

If the book of Jonah were simply a historical account, by all rights it should finish at the end of chapter 3: Nineveh repents, God relents, end of problem for the next 100 years or thereabouts.

Except it doesn’t end, and we should be glad it doesn’t, because chapter 4 is the real point of the book. After all, Nineveh’s repentance was temporary, the salvation of its individual citizens only a matter of their avoiding their inevitable dates with Sheol for five, ten, twenty or seventy years, depending on their age at the time God held back his wrath against their city. If any of the reprieved Ninevites sought out the God of Israel and became proselytes, we never get to hear about it.

Too Hot to Handle: Will Science Survive Our Politicized Culture?

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

The Autumn 2016 edition of City Journal is home to a lengthy but remarkably even-handed piece entitled “The Real War on Science”, in which author John Tierney points out that it’s actually Progressives rather than right-wingers that are holding science back.

Tierney reveals that academia has become what he calls a “monoculture”, much like the media, that is in danger of losing public trust because so many scientists insist on mixing politics with their jobs.

Tom: We’ve documented this trend here a number of times, Immanuel Can. [Way too many times to link to, in fact; click “science” in the topic sidebar on our main page to view all our articles on the subject.]

Trinity Matters

Let’s Be Simple

Here’s a simple thought.

But it will be the least simple of my simple thoughts, by far.

The triune God is not just far superior to any of the polytheists’ gods, but also to any monolithic type of god. It is better that we serve one God in three Persons than that we claim God is a big singularity.

Really?

At first glance, you might not think so. You might think it’s easier and better to have to explain a God that’s just a big ‘One’ than to have to unravel what it means to say God is triune. You might think, for example, that Muslims and monotheist Jews and even Hindus have an easier job talking about God than Christians do.

Moreover, many Christians have a very difficult time explaining what one-in-three really means, in application to God.

Check that: every Christian does.

Too Close to Home

Robert Barron comments on the parable of the wedding feast in Matthew:

“Many devout believers find the brutality and violence of the story hard to take. In a very secularized society where people have lost the sense of God, you have to shake them into awareness with a shocking story with very exaggeratedly-drawn characters, with macabre and violent shocking action.”

Barron goes on to tell his listeners not to interpret the parable in a straightforward, literal way, or to compare this “crazy king” directly to God in every respect. He suggests the Lord was just using strong language to get our attention, to “grab us by the shoulders and shake us awake”.

Semi-Random Musings (22)

You really can’t make this stuff up.

As you have probably read or heard elsewhere by now, the 117th Congress got off to a rocky start January 3 with an opening prayer that concluded with the words “amen and awoman”. Naturally the video went viral.

Of course it did. In this emotionally-charged and hyper-politicized environment, how could it not?

Anonymous Asks (127)

“Do illegitimate children go to heaven?”

A child is called illegitimate when born to a woman not legally married to the father. He or she may be the product of any of a variety of circumstances: a one night stand, a brief, broken or casual ongoing sexual relationship, prostitution, adultery or even incest. Artificial insemination has also made it possible for a woman to bring a child into the world without committing to a relationship with the donor, and this option is becoming increasingly popular in some demographics.

The Language of the Debate (3)

You have three seconds to answer: What’s the opposite of egalitarianism?

Three ... two ... one ... okay, all guesses should be in now. If your answer was “complementarianism”, my first thought is that maybe you’ve been spending too much time in the Recently Released section of your local LifeWay or Family Christian Bookstore — except both those chains went belly-up in the last four years and it doesn’t look like anyone is stepping up to fill their shoes. I guess maybe you could be Reformed ...

Here’s a crazy thought: the opposite of egalitarianism just might be biblical headship. Now there’s a dusty old concept.

Mining the Minors: Jonah (16)

There is a little bit of numeric symmetry in this last chapter of Jonah: God asks three questions, and because Jonah’s animosity toward the people of Nineveh and his disappointment at God’s delay in judging them are so intense, the prophet three times asks God to allow him to die. There are also three things in chapter 4 that God is said to have “appointed”, so there are three sets of three. Perhaps the symmetry is not so accidental.

Needless to say, it is fairly obvious Jonah’s request to die went ungranted, or else his story would never have been written.

Too Hot to Handle: Heretics Aplenty

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

According to Shane Morris of The Federalist, a LifeWay Research survey of 3,000 people found that significant numbers of Americans who identify as Christian actually embrace ancient heresies.

Tom: The survey results confirm my own prejudices, Immanuel Can. I’ve been reading for years that upwards of 80% of Americans claim to be Christian, and I’ve never been able to buy it. You can’t convince me Roe v. Wade has been law for the last forty-plus years because of 20% of the U.S. population.

Do you find the general public level of knowledge about Christianity surprising?

What Are We Waiting For?

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Thoreau famously wrote.

I hate to say it, but a great number of modern Christians could be described in just that way. Their lives are quietly unhappy — unhappy to the point of deep frustration, and even depression. Having been told that the Christian life should be abundant, joyful, meaningful and overflowing with freedom, they find themselves living in a way that is dull, tired, seemingly pointless, and characterized — when they stop to characterize it at all — by a bunch of have to’s.

A Second Opinion

One of Stand to Reason’s most popular posts last year was a Tim Barnett article entitled “What Must Ben Shapiro Do to Be Saved?” Barnett had been watching a 2018 YouTube interview in which the conservative pundit Shapiro got into a lengthy discussion with Roman Catholic bishop Robert Barron.

Shapiro and Barron found plenty of common ground, as one might expect. Then things got interesting.

Top 10 Posts of 2020

Trying to determine which ten of our 368 blog posts in 2020 drew the most eyes is not as straightforward a task as it might seem.

A post may have low numbers in its first week of publication, then catch fire later in the year when somebody links to it on Facebook or Twitter, or because it has a unique term in it that is being repeatedly entered into search engines. Totaling up pageviews only tells us a post is really popular when a few months have passed, meaning that articles written in the last quarter of any given calendar year are hard pressed to crack a Top 10 compiled purely by the numbers.

Sometimes, frankly, figuring out why any particular post drew so much attention is simply impossible even when you happen to be its author. (#6 comes to mind.)

Anonymous Asks (126)

“Did God create a second Adam?”

This is one of those questions that presumes familiarity with a particular New Testament passage. In this case the passage is 1 Corinthians 15, the subject of which is resurrection. It is there that the apostle Paul writes, “The first man Adam became a living being” (referring to a statement made way back in Genesis 2). Then he adds this: “the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.” Paul then goes on to contrast this “last Adam”, who is clearly Jesus Christ, the “second man”, with the first man, Adam, in that “The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven.”

That’s where the language of our anonymous questioner is coming from, and that’s our starting point. Paul calls Jesus at various times in the passage the “last Adam”, the “second man” and the “man from heaven”.

Saying Goodbye to 2020 (and my Career as a Prophet)

Last year around this time I decided to test whether I have the gift of prophecy, so instead of making the usual New Year’s resolutions, I reeled off a number of what I thought were really obvious predictions for the then-upcoming year, the vast majority of which have been (or will shortly be) proven correct.

As I write these words, my prophetic pitch with respect to the U.S. election is still hanging in the air over the plate, and January looks to be a very interesting month. As to my other four predictions, in all honesty I can hardly claim much prophetic acumen: it turns out I was shooting fish in a barrel.

Mining the Minors: Jonah (15)

In the last few decades, those of us who live in multicultural societies have been thoroughly propagandized against any visible display of racial animus. The social project of stigmatizing Western “racists” — to the point where even inadvertently acknowledging obvious differences between people groups commonly results in social shaming and summary disemployment — has been a great success among liberal whites, though notably less transformative across other demographics.

Having grown up in an era largely free of war, half-lobotomized by the steadily-mounting pressure of political correctness, more than a few of us may have difficulty imagining a time in which intense race-consciousness might have served the occasional useful purpose.

That would be most of the rest of human history.

Too Hot to Handle: Biden Our Time

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tom: My co-writer Immanuel Can was exchanging opinions online the other day about the prospect of a Joe Biden presidency. One commenter wrote: “You have mentioned a day of judgment; perhaps this is how it starts.”

IC’s response: “That thought has occurred to me more than once.”

Since the prospect of a Biden presidency (or really a Harris presidency) has been looming over us during this Christmas season, and since the legacy media is determined to convince us the November election is a done deal, I’m okay with talking about what that might mean for believers, for the U.S., and for the world ... provided I get to say two things first about all the white flag-waving currently going on in the conservative and Christian media.