It’s time for another book review. I am reading several books but just finished one by Larry Siedentop, entitled Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Penguin, 2014, 434 pages). The author has a fascinating and somewhat counterintuitive thesis that what we call “Liberalism” ( I will capitalize the word) was really “created” by […]
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What an interesting post and discussion in the comment section on progressive taxation. I hope Jeff Haymond doesn’t mind. Let me just add a little on the philosophical and ethical side, since the theological/Biblical has been pretty well covered and the economic problems have also been addressed. One word raised several times in the “Comment” […]
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A Tale of Two Kinds of Institutions
26 Jan 2016
I must first apologize for the length of this post. It is a bit involved, but because the subject is not so simple as we sometimes would like to believe. As I consider the current state of government and of colleges and universities, and their dysfunction, I can’t help but do so in terms of […]
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Fellow Berean Mark Caleb Smith continues to write eloquently about the need for improving civil discourse, as in our current featured post, yet I fear he will continue to be a voice in the wilderness. While he and I have some disagreements in this area, certainly he is right that a major problem in our […]
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Some recent comments by Ben Carson and a blog I wrote with associated comments from various people, have caused me to write this post as a general response as well as an elaborated examination of the underlying philosophical/theological foundations and the purpose of the United States Constitution—in short, the “theory” of our fundamental law. That […]
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Ben Carson’s Sharia “Slip”
22 Sep 2015
I have just a short comment on Ben Carson’s recent flap over his statement that in essence a Muslim should not occupy the White House. To begin, his comment was ripped out of context. He had argued that a Muslim who supported Sharia Law would not be fir for president. But in addition, he attempted […]
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I hate to so severely disagree with an otherwise insightful Christian writer, but I am forced to take issue forcefully with an article by Cal Thomas, a syndicated columnist, and a long-respected Christian cultural critic, in a Fox News Online Opinion column of September 11, 2015, entitled “America has never been a ‘Christian’ nation. Kim […]
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Technocracy and Human Flourishing
03 Aug 2015
During the Obama administration, and especially the last five years after the passage of Obamacare, we have seen numerous attempts, some successful and others still in the process, to impose more Federal top-down regulations on all sorts of human activities. Besides Obamacare and its 15,000 pages of regulations, we have the massive regulatory scheme flowing […]
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A Tribute to Constitutionalism
29 Jul 2015
I attended a meeting of the local Tea Party in my city to hear one of my colleagues (who is also a Berean) speak on the Constitution. His talk was excellent, and well-received. But as I was listening, my mind began to wander a bit (sorry Mark). Given so much misunderstanding, so much misinterpretation, and […]
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My Berean colleague Mark Smith wrote a very astute piece for this blog on the recent announcement by Ohio Governor Jon Kasich as a candidate for the presidency in 2016. He received an interesting and stimulating comment, to which I wish to reply as a separate blog. If you want the entire comment, go to […]
Bert Wheeler
Jeff Haymond
Marc Clauson
Mark Caleb Smith
Tom Mach