Consider this: those three or more years at university occur at a seminal time of life under peculiarly trying circumstances. For many, this will be the first time away from home, away from the protection of parents and the shepherding of the pastors they have always known. They will go into a stimulating, demanding environment with a host of new enticements, fresh temptations, different companions, peculiar challenges, and unexpected opportunities. For many, the regular and immediate outward restraints of knowing and being known, of parental government and pastoral oversight, will be removed for a prolonged period of time. And all this at a time when the character is only just being formed, when physically, mentally, emotionally and very often spiritually, there is a degree of uncertainty and instability and often immaturity alongside rapid development. The previous anchor points of life are necessarily (and not necessarily unhealthily) being altered, and the soul may drop its anchors in better places, worse places, or simply be cast adrift. And into this potentially fruitful, potentially devastating environment goes the student, and he or she often does so without any notion of where they will find Christian care, compassion, example and instruction over the long haul. Could it be that one of the reasons why we see so many professing Christians falling away or losing their way during their university years is that they have headed off to their colleges and courses without first determining where and how they will obtain their spiritual sustenance?
The problem with trying to turn a marriage proposal into a wannabe Oscar performance is twofold: first, it turns a monumental moment into essentially a creativity competition, the root of which is vanity. (Did anyone notice how the video focuses almost exclusively on the guy making it? It’s not about her, or even them – it’s about him.)
But more importantly, it turns the focus away from the purpose of the proposal – marriage. Because guess what? The way a man proposes has nothing to do at all with love, commitment, loyalty, or longevity. I hate to bring up America’s 50% divorce rate, but in light of videos like this, I feel somewhat compelled. We can dream up brilliant, creative, unique ways to propose, but all the flash mobs and music videos in the world can’t save a marriage when it’s past this butterflies, pie-in-the-sky phase. If anything, all the hype and hoopla of an over-the-top proposal can distract from the serious, down-to-earth business of making sure that you are marrying the right person.
How much time do you spend consuming information that you have no intention of taking action on or that you don’t care deeply about?
For example: the nightly news cycle of local crimes, the endless stream of Facebook and Twitter updates, celebrity gossip, reality TV shows, Buzzfeed articles. The list goes on.
In this age of information overload, your life can be filled with irrelevant or unnecessary information in an instant.
And here’s the main problem:
After a while, these information sources start to become normal. Pretty soon, you’re logging onto Facebook because of the fear of missing out on “something.” You turn on the news or check CNN, not because you care about a particular topic, but merely out of habit. You watch tonight’s reality TV show because that’s what you always do on Thursdays at 8pm.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for learning and soaking up new information. After all, education is one of the master keys to the universe. And staying up-to-date on important stories can help shape your worldview and make you a good global citizen.
But it is becoming dangerously easy to consume low quality information and convince yourself that it’s normal and good, when it isn’t helping you live a better life at all.
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| During World War II, a British publisher used Monopoly sets to smuggle maps, compasses, and money to prisoners of war. |
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| This luxury Wisconsin home has a two-story library that can be accessed directly from the master bedroom. It can be yours for a mere $8,750,000. |
This essay, which was added to the SAT in 2005, counts for approximately 30 percent of a test-taker’s score on the writing section, or nearly one-ninth of one’s total score. That may not seem like much, but with competition for spots at top colleges and universities more fierce than ever, performance on a portion of the test worth around 11 percent of the total could be the difference between Stanford and the second tier. So it’s not surprising that students seek strategies and tips that will help them succeed on the writing exercise. Les Perelman, the recently retired former director of MIT’s Writing Across the Curriculum program, has got a doozy.
To do well on the essay, he says, the best approach is to just make stuff up.
“It doesn’t matter if [what you write] is true or not,” says Perelman, who helped create MIT’s writing placement test and has consulted at other top universities on the subject of writing assessments. “In fact, trying to be true will hold you back.” So, for instance, in relaying personal experiences, students who take time attempting to recall an appropriately relatable circumstance from their lives are at a disadvantage, he says. “The best advice is, don’t try to spend time remembering an event,” Perelman adds, “Just make one up. And I’ve heard about students making up all sorts of events, including deaths of parents who really didn’t die.”
Our graduates lack writing skills. While adept at crafting bullet points, they often have difficulty writing in declarative sentences and complete paragraphs – thus impeding the effectiveness of their business communications, including memos, letters, and technical reports.
A 2004 Conference Board survey of 120 corporations in the Business Roundtable concluded that most companies take written communications into consideration when making their hiring and promotion decisions and implied that many current or prospective employees lack the requisite skills. This conclusion was reinforced by a 2006 Conference Board survey of 431 human resource professionals, which cited writing skills as one of the biggest gaps in workplace readiness.
Recent graduates also frequently commit basic grammatical errors, such as using an improper pronoun (e.g. “between you and I”) selecting the wrong homonym (e.g. “compliment versus complement”) or employing incorrect diction (e.g. “appraise versus apprise”). Not coincidentally, these kinds of errors are difficult to catch with spell-check.
WordPlay Shakespeare is a study aid that pairs text with videos of professional Shakespearean actors performing the same plays. Each video is short and features the performers reciting the lines on the opposite page, which often amount to less than 10 lines or 150 words at a time. Splitting the play up into these digestible chunks makes it easy to understand the emotion and intent behind every word.
If readers are still stumped, each page features a "tap to translate" button that converts the Shakespearean text — in Wordplay's case, a combination of the First Folio of 1623 and the Globe editions of 1866 — into modern language. For example, touching the translate button turns this line from Macbeth: "He can report/ As seemeth by his plight, of the revolt/ The Newest state" into this: "He can report/ Given the gory state that he's in/ The latest news from the battlefield." Wordplay also offers a pictorial synopsis at each scene's beginning and a clickable cast list with each character's biography (but beware of plot spoilers).
As with an e-book, readers can highlight portions of text and add notes. Readers can see their notes on digital index cards. Users can share their notes or favorite phrases from the play via email, text message, tweet or Facebook post.
Think about the purpose of dating. It’s not just some fun thing people do. It’s going into dating with that mindset that takes a wrecking ball to the heart.
No, the most essential purpose of dating is to seek out and get to know a potential spouse. Sure dating also entails emotional and spiritual growth. But a big part of that growth is to prepare you to be a better spouse and parent. Life and nature have this pretty stubborn trajectory, and marriage and family is the direction we hurtle, whether we like it or not.
So let’s go back to teen dating. Pretty sure there is a broad consensus that teenagers should not get married. With the exception of maybe the Duggar family, people on both sides of the aisle tend to agree that men and women should be emotionally (and heck, physically) mature before they take lifelong vows, especially if those vows are to stand a chance of actually being life-long. Ok maybe the Duggars are a bad example because Josh Duggar (married son) actually seems like more of a man than your average 30 year-old. But I digress.
Heck, call me a bad social conservative, but I don’t even think women should get married until they are in their mid-twenties and have had a little time to experience some independence after college, which yes, I think they should attend. Unmarried.
The average female body doesn’t even stop growing until around the age of 25. And call me crazy, but it seems un-ideal for a woman to have a baby when her body is still growing and developing. And considering that babies are the natural result of marriage, well – it’s worth thinking about these things.
I was having a discussion with a friend recently about career planning. I told him that I had received some advice about my career plan. I had been told that I need a more defined career plan and need to control where my career is going. Some of the advice was solid. For instance, I was told that I need to identify my weaknesses and find ways to improve them or get the experience required for my dream job. True. But I was also told that I need to work out the details right down to choosing a region and finding organizations in that region for networking. That seemed a bit intense to me. I was assured that I could apply my own personal metrics and essentially control my career path.
My friend asked me how old the person offering the advice is and I gave the age. My friend grinned and said, "Oh, well that is young enough to think he can control those things."
I love that answer.
I love it because we are all told to plan and try to control every aspect of our lives to win the prize of career, money or other desired goal. The problem is that our ability to control really stops at the end of our fingertips. We can only control ourselves (and in some instances that is complicated and difficult).
It seems to me that simple Bible study – when we open a Bible and study it together – is slowly vanishing from the church.
Oh, we have studies and we call them Bible studies, but the primary source of the study is often a book or curriculum about the Bible, not the Bible itself. The Ladies ministry has “Bible Studies” but they are really studies the thoughts and writings of Beth Moore or Mary Kassian or Lysa TerKeurst or Liz Curtis Higgs or some other well-known author and speaker. I’m not particularly offended by any of those ladies and I’m sure there is lots to be gleaned from their books and study guides. Men gather and study some book about being godly men and there’s nothing wrong with that! I even hear of preachers who do series based not on a book of the Bible, but based on someone’s book about the Bible. Small groups use this book or that study. And, in full disclosure, my life was radically changed at a pastors’ conference when we studied Henry Blackaby’s “Fresh Encounter” series, and later the “Experiencing God” curriculum was instrumental in a time of revival in my church in Cedar Rapids.
I am not opposed to Christian books, discipleship curricula and such things.
But I am just wondering, “Where did all the Bible study go?”
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| Workers at Lloyds of London pause for a moment of silence on Armistice Day |
When I teach Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, I take great pains to un-sully it from students’ film-adaptation-induced misconceptions that it’s a “romantic” novel. As a satirist, even if a gentle one, Austen offers rather unromantic corrections to vices and foibles, many of which range far beyond the surface themes of love and marriage. Indeed, like most early novels, Austen’s contend with the seismic social shifts birthed by modernity, particularly the rise of the individual. In Pride and Prejudice, as in Austen’s other works, the private angst surrounding the choice of a marriage partner really reflects the larger, public anxieties swirling around a disintegrating class structure, a new social mobility, and increasing personal autonomy.
Nevertheless, the truth is that I still learned everything I needed to know about marriage from Pride and Prejudice
With lots of books and blog posts out there about law and gospel, about grace and effort, about the good news of this and the bad news of that, it’s clear that Christians are still wrestling with the doctrine of progressive sanctification. Can Christians do anything truly good? Can we please God? Should we try to? Is there a place for striving in the Christian life? Can God be disappointed with the Christian? Does the gospel make any demands? These are good questions that require a good deal of nuance and precision to answer well.
Thankfully, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The Reformed confessions and catechisms of the 16th and 17th centuries provide answers for all these questions. For those of us who subscribe to the Three Forms of Unity or to the Westminster Standards this means we are duty bound to affirm, teach, and defend what is taught in our confessional documents. For those outside these confessional traditions, there is still much wisdom you can gain in understanding what Christians have said about these matters over the centuries. And most importantly, these standards were self-consciously grounded in specific texts of Scripture. We can learn a lot from what these documents have to teach us from the Bible.
Ruth Fitzmaurice watched as the consultant, a man they had never met before, entered the hospital room and made his way towards her husband’s bed.
Simon, a talented filmmaker and the father of three small boys, lay there with a tube going down his throat, pushing air into his lungs, allowing him to breathe but preventing him from being able to talk.
They listened as the medic spelled out in no uncertain terms what he expected them to do.
'He basically announced that this was the end of the road,’ explains Ruth. ‘That was it, they had done all they could - that he had phoned Simon’s own consultant in Beaumont Hospital who agreed that ventilation for Motor Neurone Disease (MND) is not advocated in Ireland.’
The consultant continued, telling Simon that it was now time for him to make ‘the hard choice’ - to agree to come off the ventilator.But Simon was not going to give up that easily.
Despite the consultant’s stark and very clear recommendation, Simon refused to grant permission to take him off the machine that was keeping him alive.
‘Simon’s family very much think for themselves, and Simon in particular is a very strong character,’ smiles Ruth. ‘He wouldn’t be fazed by being told what to do by a doctor, he would question things and say: “Hang on a second.”
‘The consultant told us if he stayed on the ventilator that he wouldn’t get out of the hospital. With MND [a degenerative condition that destroys the cells that control voluntary muscles and can affect speaking, walking, breathing, swallowing and general movement] it’s like, “where do you think this is going? You’re only going to get worse. Why would you choose to ventilate?” So that’s when we decided to fight.’Not only did they decide not to take Simon off the ventilator they went a step further by deciding to have more children (they already had three when they received his diagnosis). They ended up having twins.
‘Everyone thought we were a bit mad,’ laughs Ruth. ‘But we felt in the face of death and with everything that had happened, well, kids are the ultimate opposite of all that, they’re life-affirming.’
On the anniverary of his death, Lewis will be commemorated with a memorial plaque in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, which honors authors and other cultural figures whose work has shaped English society. A two-day conference on Lewis's works will begin the preceding day.
Alister McGrath, the latest to examine Lewis biographically, believes this anniversary year will solidify Lewis's reputation as an apologist and classicist. At Oxford's recent literary conference, McGrath's sold-out talk on Lewis led to requests for him to give three more.
"We've minimized Lewis's importance [in the UK], and we have catching up to do [with U.S. evangelicals]," said the author of C.S. Lewis: A Life. "Lewis is here to stay; that debate is over. Now there is this sense of, 'There is more to learn from Lewis, so let's read him again.' "
These questions remind me of an article Thabiti Anyabwile wrote during the Strange Fire Conference, in which he explained why this issue is so important. He wrote, “First, we have to admit that there’s a correct and an incorrect position on this issue. Somebody is right and somebody is wrong… . Second, we have to admit that how we view this issue substantially impacts the nature of the Christian life. It matters. It’s not an inconsequential idea. Someone worships God appropriately, someone doesn’t… . Third, we have to admit that this issue practically impacts Christian worship and fellowship. It’s not only a private matter, but a corporate one as well.”
I agree with all of that. This is an issue of critical importance because it affects our view of God as well as our understanding of how to live out the Christian life, both individually and corporately.
I don’t think, however, that this issue is unclear in Scripture. The fact that Christians disagree on what the Bible teaches does not mean that there is a lack of clarity in Scripture, but rather in Christians. The Word of God is our authoritative rule for faith and practice—meaning that it is perfectly sufficient for teaching sound doctrine and governing right living. Certainly, an orthodox pneumatology fits under that umbrella.
On the one hand, I would agree that this is a second-level doctrinal issue—meaning that someone can be either a continuationist or a cessationist and still be a genuine follower of Jesus Christ. I have always maintained that position, and I reiterated that point several times during the conference. I have good friends who consider themselves continuationists, and I am confident that these men are fellow brothers in Christ. But that doesn’t excuse the seriousness of the error. In fact, I would appeal to my continuationist brethren to reconsider their views in light of what Scripture teaches.
On the other hand, I am firmly convinced that this secondary issue has the very real potential to taint a person’s understanding of the gospel itself. In such cases, it becomes a primary issue. For example, charismatic theology does corrupt the gospel when it expresses itself in the form of the prosperity gospel. Moreover, the global charismatic movement happily shelters other heretical movements—such as Catholic Charismatics and Oneness Pentecostals. Taken together, the number of charismatics who hold to a false form of the gospel (whether it is a gospel of health and wealth or a gospel of works righteousness) number in the hundreds of millions, which means they actually represent the majority of the global charismatic movement. That is why we took such a strong stand both at the conference and in the book.
An ordinance adopted by the City of Copperas Cove could mean an arrest for patrons if they don't return library materials.
A recent case landed one man behind bars for a book he'd had checked out for more than three years.
On Wednesday Jory Enck was booked into jail and released for overdue library materials.
Court documents show he checked out a GED study guide in 2010 and didn't respond to attempts from the library to get the book back.
Being a boy can be a serious liability in today’s classroom. As a group, boys are noisy, rowdy and hard to manage. Many are messy, disorganized and won’t sit still. Young male rambunctiousness, according to a recent study, leads teachers to underestimate their intellectual and academic abilities. “Girl behavior is the gold standard in schools says psychologist Michael Thompson. “Boys are treated like defective girls.”
These “defective girls” are not faring well academically. Compared with girls, boys earn lower grades, win fewer honors and are less likely to go to college. One education expert has quipped that if current trends continue, the last male will graduate from college in 2068. In today’s knowledge-based economy, success in the classroom has never been more crucial to a young person’s life prospects. Women are adapting; men are not.
American society does not talk much about calling anymore. It is more likely to think in terms of career. Yet, for many people a career becomes the altar on which they sacrifice their lives. Benjamin Honeycutt, a historian who specializes in the history of work at the University of Iowa, notes that work has become our new religion, where we worship and give our time. As people’s commitment to family, community and faith are shrinking, they begin to look to their careers to provide them with meaning, connectedness, identity and self-esteem.
A calling, which is something I do for God, is replaced by a career, which threatens to become my god. A career is something I choose for myself; a calling is something I receive. A career is something I do for myself; a calling is something I do for God. A career promises status, money or power; a calling generally promises difficulty and even some suffering – and the opportunity to be used by God. A career is about upward mobility; a calling generally leads to downward mobility.*****************
In my experience as a Christian and Preacher, you would think that any disagreements, arguments, or debates I'd have would be with the non-Christian, the atheist, or those from other religions, but not true. It seems anytime I've had a disagreement with someone over Christianity it is always a fundamental or legalistic Christian who feels it's their mission and life's work to be God's police to the world.
These types of people make it their personal mission in life to prove others wrong, be right, argue, debate, belittle, name-call, and look down on those who do not line up with them whether doctrinally, theologically, denominationally, or other church or faith issues. It's a mind-set of either you are for me or against me. You either agree with me or you are a liberal, heretic, sodomite, watered-down, ignorant, stupid, (add you own description here), I've been called a lot. The sad thing is I don't like to argue(really!), but some folks can't seem to understand that, their whole faith system is made up of proving others wrong, being right, and making a point to "police" Christians.
I am writing this to plead with Christian parents to require obedience of their children. I am moved to write this by watching young children pay no attention to their parents’ requests, with no consequences. Parents tell a child two or three times to sit or stop and come or go, and after the third disobedience, they laughingly bribe the child. This may or may not get the behavior desired.
Last week, I saw two things that prompted this article. One was the killing of 13-year-old Andy Lopez in Santa Rosa, California, by police who thought he was about to shoot them with an assault rifle. It was a toy gun. What made this relevant was that the police said they told the boy two times to drop the gun. Instead he turned it on them. They fired.
I do not know the details of that situation or if Andy even heard the commands. So I can’t say for sure he was insubordinate. So my point here is not about young Lopez himself. It’s about a “what if.” What if he heard the police, and simply defied what they said? If that is true, it cost him his life. Such would be the price of disobeying proper authority.
I witnessed such a scenario in the making on a plane last week. I watched a mother preparing her son to be shot. I was sitting behind her and her son, who may have been seven years old. He was playing on his digital tablet. The flight attendant announced that all electronic devices should be turned off for take off. He didn’t turn it off. The mother didn’t require it. As the flight attendant walked by, she said he needed to turn it off and kept moving. He didn’t do it. The mother didn’t require it.
One last time, the flight attendant stood over them and said that the boy would need to give the device to his mother. He turned it off. When the flight attendant took her seat, the boy turned his device back on, and kept it on through the take off. The mother did nothing. I thought to myself, she is training him to be shot by police.
There is much more than a whiff of the misogyny in denigrating mothers of multiple children as brainless, in stating that mothers who are homemakers are inferior to those who “earn” their living, or in attacking women for prioritizing fertility above independence. It’s not just that nobody on planet earth could be truly independent — which is to say completely self-reliant or free of any other human support. It’s not just that we each depended on others from the moment of our conception to birth, but all of society is comprised of individuals who work with each other and depend on each other throughout their lives. Or healthy societies are, at least. It may be impolitic to suggest that men and women are in any way different, science be damned, but many women have a particular specialty in cultivating relationships and family. To denigrate women who acknowledge and accept this as a good thing rather than fight against it is not exactly life-affirming.
A Pennsylvania woman set out with a video camera to learn what college students in her state know about the Holocaust — and discovered an incredible lack of knowledge not only of the genocide of the Jews, but of basic facts about U.S. history and World War II.
Rhonda Fink-Whitman visited college campuses in Pennsylvania this fall, including the venerated Ivy League institution the University of Pennsylvania, where she was repeatedly faced with a remarkable ignorance about events that took place in the last century.
Students didn’t know where Normandy was, why U.S. forces landed there, why the U.S. even entered the war or who was president at the time. (Wilson, Eisenhower and JFK were among the guesses.) One student didn’t know who Anne Frank was, because he said he never read the book.
The moral revolution we are now witnessing on the issue of homosexuality is without precedent in human history in terms of its scale and velocity. We are not looking at a span of centuries, or even the length of one century. This revolution is taking place within a single human generation.
I would argue that no moral revolution on this scale has ever been experienced by a society that remained intact, even as no moral revolution of this velocity has yet been experienced. We can now see more clearly where this revolution began. It is virtually impossible to see where it ends.
But, for the first time in the experience of most Americans, the moral revolution revolving around marriage, the family, and human sexuality is now clearly becoming a religious liberty issue. The rights of parents to raise their children according to their most basic and fundamental theological and moral convictions are now at stake. Courts have ruled in some jurisdictions that parents cannot even “opt out” their children from sex education driven by moral revisionism. Legislatures in California and New Jersey have made it illegal for mental health professionals to tell minors that there is anything wrong with homosexual sexuality, orientation, or relationships. Parents are put on notice. How long will it be before the moral authority of the secular state is employed to allow children to “divorce” their parents? How long before the logic of sexual revolution and sexual self-expression leads to parents being told what they must allow and facilitate with their own children when it comes to sex, gender, and sexual orientation? The logic of moral change by legal coercion is already fully on display in many modern legal debates. How long will a respect for parental rights and religious liberty hold back the flooding river of this moral revolution?
Disney movies aren’t telling girls that they should limit their aspirations to becoming princesses (although young women sometimes do become one, so be ready); they are teaching them to adopt the values of Disney princesses: kindness (Snow White), compassion (Ariel), intelligence (Belle), humility (Cinderella), courage (Merida), and determination (Tiana), among others. These are worthy attributes for boys as well as girls, but the point is that Disney isn’t steering girls toward being future trophy wives – it’s promoting values that make you a decent person, regardless of your career or lack thereof.****************
I'm writing this post on a Friday. It's been a frantic week, with a higher-than-usual number of meetings to attend, decisions to make, content to create, and people needing a response.
When I leave my office this afternoon, I will be leaving behind an inbox full of emails awaiting response.
There are editorial tasks I hoped to cross off my list this week. Unfortunately, they have risen in defiance of my careful agenda and have chosen to stubbornly persist into next week's to-do list.
hen I leave, I'll have my laptop bag strapped on my shoulders, but it's all the stuff I carry around in my mind that will weigh me down. The blogs to write, curriculum to edit, writers to enlist, the teams I lead, the contacts I need to make...
And like I do every week, I will whisper to myself as I walk out the door: And God saw that it was good.
