I appreciated my Berans colleague Bert Wheeler’s post on immigration. But I would like to offer an alternative viewpoint that does not totally disagree with his. I understand that Dr. Wheeler is not suggesting a “no borders” policy. Nor does he deny the necessity to screen criminals or potential terrorists. He also does agree with […]
Archives
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A Modest Response on Immigration
23 Jan 2018
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Compassion in Houston: Altruism or Selfishness?
04 Sep 2017
On a Fox News group show this morning (Saturday, Sept 2 on “Bulls and Bears”) I heard one person say that businesses in Houston had opened their buildings for individuals and even were giving merchandise away to those in need. The pundit then added that the owners of these businesses probably acted as they did […]
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Deconstructing the “De-growth” Movement
20 Aug 2017
Tom Rogan in the Washington Examiner wrote a very interesting piece on the new expression of an old idea–”degrowth.” (see http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-far-left-has-an-idiotic-new-craze-reduce-economic-growth/article/2631274). He leads with these words: “Even the Soviets sought to maximize economic output. But today’s contemporary far-left are far bolder: they believe that economics itself is wrong.” He writes further, “From their perspective, government […]
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The Christian and Cultural Engagement
17 Aug 2017
Cultural engagement. What is it and how should Christians be “doing” it, assuming they should? And perhaps I shouldn’t even assume that. At any rate, I would like to explore the Christian in relation to his or her potential or real involvement in the political or cultural realms physically outside the church and apart from […]
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I happened to catch a couple of minutes of the Rush Limbaugh program, in which he was playing some snippets from an interview of Kurt Anderson and Charlie Rose on PBS, on the subject of Anderson’s new book, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire. The theme of the books seems to center on how conservative talk […]
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Dick Armey, the former majority leader of the House of Representatives during the 90s, used to say something to the effect of “Republicans are always afraid you won’t understand the issue; Democrats are always afraid you will” Democrats seemingly could care less about reams of data, but live and die by the anecdote–they just need […]
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I realized only this week that last year was the centennial of the birth of Jane Jacobs, who was born in 1916 and died in 2006. Now some or all of my readers might not recognize the name, but among city planners, architectural scholars, urban historians, urban economists and political scientists of an urban bent, […]
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Speech: Its Value and Its Limits
29 Apr 2017
Several incidents have occurred recently at American colleges and universities that raise the question of where freedom of speech is headed today. Now let’s be clear. Not all speech is morally acceptable if we are serious about our Biblical commitments. Private Christian universities have good reason sometimes to create conditions for edifying and pure expression […]
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Democracy: Is It Over-hyped? Or Overdone?
09 Mar 2017
I noticed a poll taken the other day in connection with Fox News (unfortunately I did not catch the purveyor of that poll, perhaps Fox itself). Whether the methodology was right or not, I don’t know but it found that 50% of people polled opposed the elimination of the Obamacare insurance mandate, while 48% supported […]
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The Examined Life–With Some Help
17 Feb 2017
Why do people still read Plato? Aristotle? The Bible? Augustine? Thomas Aquinas? John Locke? Immanuel Kant (well, maybe not so much)? What unifies them? It isn’t religion. Plato and Aristotle were most certainly not Christians. Augustine and Aquinas would have disagreed on the extent of man’s capacity to know and to will the good. The […]