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The institution of the family, which preceded the Fall of man and remained after the Fall, for the well-being  of the human race, is the institution most protected by God's law and is the very pattern by which we understand both our relationship to God as Father, and the creational model by which the Church is governed. We further see this centrality by the fact that in scripture, four of the Ten Commandments immediately concern the family (not the church or state) because the family controls welfare, property, education, inheritance, children, and cares for the aged. It is viewed as the basic government and consequently, when it is eroded or weakened, the social fabric of any society moves swiftly to decay regardless of what the State tries to do to  replace it…Without healthy and godly Christian families, all of society moves toward ruin. There is no social substitute for the family, in either Church or State, so the Church today must labour to train, protect and equip ...

Gene Edward Veith has written a wonderful  open letter  to encourage pastors, as we wage war on the front lines of today’s cultural and spiritual battles. I particularly found his summary of the morphing of competing ideas to Christianity very helpful (with a little bit of rearranging of the points on my part):  “Modern and postmodern ideas and practices that have challenged Christianity have been taken to ever greater extremes. But some have been pushed so far that they are coming apart or morphing into something new. The arts seem to be at a creative dead end, rehashing their past and running out of new ideas.  Science was thought to have banished the mysteries of existence, but now it is showing the universe to be more mysterious than ever. Technology is performing wonders, but in giving us virtual reality and virtual relationships, it is undermining actual reality and actual relationships. Society has become an assemblage of isolated individuals, under a pola...

"We've come to this place where history is viewed only entirely through the prism of the present"  Those are the words of Emma Soames, Winston Churchill's granddaughter as reported by the BBC .  I call what she is talking about "moral populism". We know about "political populism", which has been associated with Brexit and Donald Trump. We now need to get used to the new reality of moral populism, where how the country thinks about itself is now based purely on who is shouting the loudest. Everything is seen through the prism not just of the present but as an opportunity to overturn existing moral consensus. The present is always better than the past.   I would suggest that the reason why this is happening is that we have no referee. In every society or field (from sports to economics) there are some basic rules than govern the rules of the game. Prinicples that help those who belong to it to accept or reject ideas.  Western civilisation had such ru...

I am privileged to have a group of colleagues who like a bit of intellectual debate over ideas and current events. A month ago we found ourselves discussing the inequality of incomes in the United States in the context of Ferguson. We were curious to know the disparity of household incomes across blacks, Hispanics and White Americans. In the course of that discussion we found that black people only make up 13% of the population, third behind Latinos (15%) and whites (72%). There was collective bewilderment. Apparently I am not the only one who was ignorant of this basic fact. I had always thought blanks represented something like 40-45%. That discovery led me to draw the following conclusions, as an African looking in from the outside.

"Whether I do something really funny or really stupid, it is okay with me..I think that is what life is about. You can't take life itself too seriously...At the end of the day, nobody really cares. You're going to be forgotten anyway. The issues and problems that you think are like mountains that you have to deal with now, after time goes by, nobody cares...Might as well have a good time with it." Wesley Snipes   in a recent interview   after the release of Sylvester Stallone's 'The Expendables 3'. The  'Demolition Man' star is  now back on   on the big screen for the first time since his release from prison after doing time for three years after failing to file income tax returns. He began his jail term in December 2010.

One of the biggest mistakes humans make is to believe there is only one way. Actually, there are many diverse paths leading to what you call God. OPRAH WINFREY The Lord Jesus said : "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me". And he warned us that "unless you believe that I am he you will die in your sins."

Steve Tobak sees the signs in a recent article for Fox Business on the “Lost Art of Discipline” : “...I rarely have a coherent thought before noon and my workdays are peppered with blood-pumping and synapse-sparking activities that bear little resemblance to what I do for a living. But throughout my career I have always sacrificed whatever I had to and pushed my people to do the same to ensure the job got done. And that’s getting harder and harder to do all the time. Granted, there have always been distractions – the archenemies of discipline – but these days, they seem to be multiplying at an alarming rate. And, more importantly, nobody’s immune, not even our business and political leaders…” “....Twitter CEO Dick Costolo recently got himself embroiled in a ludicrous online debate over the gender constitution of his management team and board of directors... not a great idea, especially with an IPO on the way….Senator John McCain couldn’t get through a Senate committee hearing w...

David Suissa writing in the Jewish Journal quotes this startling statistic of the level of persecution of Christians around the world.  ....But hidden in all the chaos is a monstrous injustice that has received very little media attention: The rampant persecution of Christians. “Few people realize that we are today living through the largest persecution of Christians in history,” Bruce Thornton, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote on the institute’s Web site. “Estimates of the numbers of Christians under assault range from 100 [million] to 200 million. According to one estimate, a Christian is martyred every five minutes.”..... Copyright © Chola Mukanga 2013

During my daily travel I come across some bizarre sightings which usually sends my heart wondering. I have learned that nearly everything is telling us something about God and the nature of man. Recently, I saw a Chinese man with his newly wed wife standing in the middle of the road in London with traffic in both directions. I know they were newlywed because the man was dressed in his suit and the woman in her bridal dressing! Alongside the couple was the camera man. Somewhere along the way the two had decided that they wanted to remember their wedding against the backdrop of London’s historic builds and heavy traffic.

George Musser recently wrote a fascinating piece 'The Roadmap to Alpha Centauri' where he discusses the possibility of interstellar travel within our lifetime : "..When it comes to starships, it's best not to get hung up on details. By the time humanity gets to the point it might actually build one, our very notions of travel may well have changed. "Do we need to send full humans?" asks Long. "Maybe we just need to send embryos, or maybe in the future, you could completely download yourself into a computer, and you can remanufacture yourself at the other end through something similar to 3-D printing." Today, a starship seems like the height of futuristic thinking. Future generations might find it quaint...." Musser presumably wants to reassure us that in the end, as George W. Bush once said, "we do not know where this journey will end, yet we know this: human beings are headed into the cosmos". This eagerness of human beings t...

Max Pemberton writing recently in the Daily Telegraph argues that paedophilia is a illness : It is too easy to see paedophiles as caricatures of evil, devoid of emotions and reason, but that view helps no one. In fact, the majority of those who find themselves attracted to children are tormented by their predilection. According to the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases, paedophilia is a mental illness, yet there is scant investment in resources to help treat paedophiles. I find this dichotomy quite false. Of course paedophilia is a form of addiction and therefore by definition it is a physical illness that has left its addicts helpless and tormented. And it is also equally true that it is a spiritual illness of sin and evil in our world.  It is a spiritual disease because it is perversion of God's created natural order.  What is important is for us to realise is that there's no conflict between these two facts. On the contrary one pressupposes the oth...

David Brooks draws on what the search of frequently used words from Google's book database of 5.2 million books published between 2008 and 2015 tells about changing culture : Over the past half-century, society has become more individualistic. As it has become more individualistic, it has also become less morally aware, because social and moral fabrics are inextricably linked. The atomization and demoralization of society have led to certain forms of social breakdown, which government has tried to address, sometimes successfully and often impotently. This story, if true, should cause discomfort on right and left. Conservatives sometimes argue that if we could just reduce government to the size it was back in, say, the 1950s, then America would be vibrant and free again. But the underlying sociology and moral culture is just not there anymore. Government could be smaller when the social fabric was more tightly knit, but small government will have different and more cataclysmic ef...

Fiorello Provera (Foreign Affairs Committee, EU Parliament) recnetly wrote an article in Project Syndicate noting that increasing persecutions of Arab Christians in the wake of the Arab spring. For many Christians in these lands the spring it certainly is not : The Endangered Arab Christian, Fiorello Provera, Project Syndicate, Commentary : The recent abductions of Syriac Orthodox Archbishop Yohanna Ibrahim and his Greek Orthodox counterpart, Paul Yazigi, reflect not only the increasing brutality of Syria’s civil war, but also the escalating crisis for Christians across the Arab world – one that could end up driving them away altogether. According to the International Society for Human Rights, 80% of all acts of religious persecution worldwide in 2012 were directed at Christians. This surge in discrimination against Christian communities in countries where they have lived for many centuries can be explained largely by increasing Islamist militancy and the rise of political I...

Suicides among midde-aged Americans has been on the rise in the United States. More people die from suicides than vehicle accidents : In 2010, an average of nearly 18 out of every 100,000 people aged 35-64 died from suicide - four more than a decade earlier. In 2010, motor vehicle accidents killed 33,687 people, while 38,364 died from suicide that year, according to the CDC, the government agency tasked with providing research and recommendations on US health and safety. Among non-Hispanic whites and Native Americans, annual suicide rates leaped 40 percent and 65 percent, respectively. Nearly three times as many men as women in this age group killed themselves: around 27 men compared to eight women per 100,000 in 2010. And the CDC found that, while most suicides were committed with guns, the number of people dying from suffocation and hanging rose the fastest - by more than 80 percent - over the last decade. Experts are not certain why suicide rates are increasing so marke...

That is the question addressed in To Change The World : The Irony, Tragedy and Possibility of Christianity In The Late Modern World by James Davidson Hunter. He is the LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture and Social Theory at the University of Virginia and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. In short, a man who knows something about something! The book seeks to address how Christians should engage themselves in the modern world. But it is more than that because within this book he explains to us how cultural change comes about. I was particularly struck by the simple but not so obvious idea that cultural change is not democratic but comes largely from overlapping networks. We certainly see this in both Amerindian and African independence struggles. We also see it today why many Zambians have failed to bring about a paradigm shift in thinking. The majority may want a different Zambia but the majority don't run the country. Equal...

Thomas Friedman commenting on the impact of internet on radicalisation of terrorists has wider warning and advice for everyone :  So more people are more directly exposed to more raw information and opinion every day from everywhere. As such, it is more important than ever that we build the internal software, the internal filters, into every citizen to sift out fact from fiction in this electronic torrent, which offers so much information that has never been touched by an editor, a censor or a libel lawyer. That’s why, when the Internet first emerged and you had to connect via a modem, I used to urge that modems sold in America come with a warning label from the surgeon general, like cigarettes. It would read: “Attention: Judgment not included.” And that’s why the faster, more accessible and ultramodern the Internet becomes, the more all the old-fashioned stuff matters: good judgment, respect for others who are different and basic values of right and wrong. Those you c...

Tina Rosenberg observes that human beings deceive themselves about their rationality. We don’t usually decide how to behave by weighing the pros and cons. In reality, the strongest influence on our decisions is the example of the people around us. More importantly such “peer influence” is usually imaginary. We have a tendency to overestimate other people’s bad behaviour and therefore we end up behaving more badly ourselves. Calls therefore to reform behaviour by emphasising how bad people are don’t always work very well. In her words : Bad behaviour is usually more visible than good. It’s what people talk about, it’s what the news media report on, it’s what experts focus on. Experts are always trying to change bad behaviour by warning of how widespread it is, and they take any opportunity to label it a crisis. “The field loves talking about the problems because it generates political and economic support,” said Perkins.

A  recent  fascinating BBC article  Is modern life making us lonely ?  suggests that 1 in 10 people in Great Britain are lonely and it is not just due to an ageing population. People from all walks of life across the western world are becoming lonely. According to Dr Andrew McCulloch, chief executive of the UK’s Mental Health Foundation although there is no hard historic data to show loneliness there is some sociological evidence that it is getting worse :

Louis Rene Beres ponders where civilisation is as man's evil on man continues on a grand scale : After Nuremberg, after the Holocaust, one might have expected a far-reaching change in human conduct, a welcome reduction of egregious harms occasioned by both new knowledge and new law. Yet, let us look around us at the present moment. The views are not encouraging. Look at Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, Sudan, Uganda, and the Congo. Let us try to figure out the presumptively democratic but also riotous ethos sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East. Not to be forgotten, there is present-day Iran. Today, its faith-based leaders openly declare a determinedly genocidal intent against Israel. Let us also consider Cambodia, Argentina, Rwanda, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia.

Rupert Shortt has fascinating article in the   Daily Telegraph  on the growing persecution of Christians around the world  : Imagine the unspeakable fury that would erupt across the Islamic world if a Christian-led government in Khartoum had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese Muslims over the past 30 years. Or if Christian gunmen were firebombing mosques in Iraq during Friday prayers. Or if Muslim girls in Indonesia had been abducted and beheaded on their way to school, because of their faith. Such horrors are barely thinkable, of course. But they have all occurred in reverse, with Christians falling victim to Islamist aggression. Only two days ago, a suicide bomber crashed a jeep laden with explosives into a packed Catholic church in Kaduna, northern Nigeria, killing at least eight people and injuring more than 100. The tragedy bore the imprint of numerous similar attacks by Boko Haram (which roughly translates as “Western educa...