Faithful Steward Ministries and FSM Women's Outreach
Christian Outreach Ministry to those Incarcerated, with Addictions and our Military
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Black Friday will be different this year, thanks to COVID-19. Instead of a single day of sleep-deprived consumers trampling security guards for flatscreen TV’s, it’s more a couple weeks of online over-marketing. While the presumed decrease in physical violence is certainly an improvement, the additional appeals to fill the voids in our hearts and minds with material goods isn’t…
JOHN STONESTREET WITH ROBERTO RIVERA
Perhaps the most helpful framework I know of in wrestling with moral issues comes from T.S. Eliot. Before we can know what to do with something, we must know what that something is for. For example, before we decide what we should do with human life (whether we should take it, make it, or remake it), we should know what human life is for.
The opposing sides of contemporary debates around bioethics, i.e. abortion, doctor-assisted suicide, in-vitro fertilization, and other assisted reproductive technologies, often proceed from very different beliefs about what it means to be human and, therefore, what it means for humans to flourish…
In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis imagines how an experienced demonic operative might advise a younger, less experienced understudy in the intricacies of counter-Christian spiritual warfare. In one passage especially relevant right now, Lewis describes how politics could be used to tempt and thwart a Christ-follower. The setting is World War II Britain. “Uncle Screwtape” says it this way:
…Weiss describes a growing and institutionally enforced anti-Semitism, and proceeds to list a series of incidents that she says cannot be accurately understood as isolated, but instead as an essential and insidious component of the new liberalism, a “mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality.”
The parallel passage in the New Testament can be found in the book of James 4:13-17 . The message is pretty plain, you can plan for tomorrow all you want ( and there is not biblical principle against proper preparation and planning) but do not brag about how successful you are to be for only God knows if there will even be a tomorrow.
Last Wednesday, during a new segment on the BreakPoint Podcast in which Shane Morris and I field questions from listeners, we tackled the following question / lecture: “If abortion is so evil then why does God abort millions of fertilized eggs every day? With you folks, almost everything is black and white. No nuance. If a Fetus has deformities to prevent it from living a few hours after birth, then why put the mother through this trauma?”
Questions like this, especially in light of the incredibly strategic cultural moment we are in right now when it comes to defending innocent preborn life, is why we called an audible for the next Colson Center Short Course. Four Tuesday nights in a row, beginning September 8, you can be trained to be a pro-life advocate by the best. The course is called “Champion Life: How to Oppose Abortion and Defend the Unborn,” by Scott Klusendorf of the Life Training Institute, you will leave each week’s teaching prepared to do just what the subtitle says: oppose abortion and defend the unborn…
Two years ago, when Jackie Hill-Perry, a talented writer, poet, and speaker, spoke at a Wilberforce Weekend, she had the entire room leaning forward in their chairs. A powerful speaker with a powerful testimony about following Christ out of a lesbian lifestyle–no one in the audience wanted to miss a word.
Recently, Perry shared her testimony in a YouTube interview with Christian comedian KevOnStage. After leaving a long-term relationship when she gave her life to Jesus and after years of discipleship and deep involvement in the Church, Jackie married Preston Perry, a poet and apologist. They have two daughters, with a third baby on the way.
When, in the YouTube interview, Jackie shared she still struggles with same-sex attraction, her host was noticeably surprised. So was his audience. Many commenters accused Jackie of “suppressing her true self” and “denying the humanity” of others with same-sex attraction. After days of social media pressure, KevOnStage decided to take down the video.
The anger directed at the Perrys reflects a sad fatalism that permeates both the LGBTQ movement and the so-called “gay-affirming” Christians. Their critique is rooted in a bad idea, that our sexual desires fundamentally define us. Therefore, anyone with same-sex attraction will be ultimately powerless against it. No other temptations or sins are thought of this way…
Though Americans remain a morally serious people, at least in our quickness to condemn each other as “Hitlers” for various misdeeds, we are clearly not concerned with moral consistency. We demand churches close to stop the spread of COVID, but not Wal-marts, bars, or casinos. We protest police violence with acts of violence. We celebrate Hugh Hefner as some great liberator of women, and, weeks after his death, condemn Harvey Weinstein. We say “character counts” when it’s their guy in office, but not when it’s our guy.
Then, last week, after three-plus years of the #MeToo movement protesting the objectification and abuse of women, the most objectifying song in history, one that reduces women to nothing more their private parts, hit #1 on the charts. I couldn’t possibly share the lyrics of this song … any of them. Please, do not look them up. The two women rappers who perform this song repeatedly call themselves prostitutes, although not using that word, and beg men to treat them as such.
By any definition, legal or otherwise, America’s most popular song and its accompanying video are best called pornography, and is available everywhere to anyone of any age…
According to news reports, there’s at least one bright spot amidst all the COVID-19 bad news: the planet is beginning to heal itself. With those pesky and invasive humans stuck at home, animals are reclaiming wild spaces (and even city streets) and, of course, CO2 emissions are down. The underlying message of these news reports is this: What the Earth needs to heal is fewer people.
The idea isn’t new. Since at least the 1970s, environmental activists have advocated for reducing the human “footprint,” which ultimately means reducing the number of humans.
For example, in his latest film “Planet of the Humans,” Michael Moore argues that green energy, such as solar, wind, and other renewables, will get us nowhere. Our only hope to combat climate change, he says, is limiting population growth…
