Wisdom For Your Weekend: your weekly installment of things we’ve been reading around the web.
Articles of the Week
Christianity Packs Its Office and Leaves the Building, Jonathan Leeman. “Well, once again, a lawyer has told me to clean out my desk and vacate the premises. In truth, he was talking about natural law, not me, Christianity. But whenever someone says, ‘A government that tries to invoke divine law ceases to be of, by, and for the people,’ I’m indicted too. Suppose then that all of my moral principles and I really did pack up our desk, put our files into a box, and let the security guard escort us out of the building?”
Outrage Against Abortion—Good Or Bad? Trevin Wax. A British woman decides to have an abortion, exercising her so-called “reproductive rights” in a nation that presumably approves. So why is it that most of British society is bashing her for it, the Pro-choice group leading the way? And what does this say about how we should think of abortion?
But What About Gluttony? Kevin DeYoung. “Why do conservative Christians make such a fuss about homosexuality and give everyone a free pass—most notably themselves—when it comes to gluttony? That’s a question you hear a lot of us these days and one you should expect to hear again and again, posed in a hundred different ways, in the years ahead.”
Diversity and Dishonesty, Ross Douthat, New York Times. This is an insightful piece about the dual nature of pluralism. There is a pluralism that stands firmly in one worldview and allows for differing viewpoints, and we should support this type. (“I believe this is true and good, but I respect your decision to believe otherwise.”) But then there is a more insidious brand of pluralism that undermines anyone’s claim to live out any worldview commitment. (“What you believe is true and good is acceptable, but you have to keep it to yourself.”) We all have an ideology that runs our life; better to acknowledge that ideology openly than to pretend you are truly neutral toward them all.
On The Lighter Side
“Can you love your neighbor as yourself and—at the same time—knee him in the face?” Steve Colbert highlights some alternative methods of church growth.
