Articles

Purpose Therefore we do not lose heart. – 2 Corinthians 4:16 I may finish the race and complete the task. – Acts 20:22 All of us need a purpose • Work without purpose can become mindless, heartless drudgery. • The great purpose of Moses was to lead the Hebrews out of Egyptian slavery and into the Promised Land. • Had…

Recently,  Barack Obama — a Demosthenes determined to elevate our politics from coarseness to elegance, a Pericles sent to ameliorate our rhetorical impoverishment — spoke at the University of Michigan. He came to that very friendly venue — in 2012, he received 67 percent of the vote in Ann Arbor’s county — after visiting a local sandwich shop, where a…

Recently,  Barack Obama — a Demosthenes determined to elevate our politics from coarseness to elegance, a Pericles sent to ameliorate our rhetorical impoverishment — spoke at the University of Michigan. He came to that very friendly venue — in 2012, he received 67 percent of the vote in Ann Arbor’s county — after visiting a local sandwich shop, where a…

The Bible tells the stories of many leaders and managers: Jacob Joseph Moses Joshua Samson David Solomon Job Daniel Jesus Peter Paul Timothy Honesty and Integrity An honest answer is like a kiss on the lips – Proverbs 24:26 Judge me, O Lord according to my integrity. – Psalm 7:8 James Kouzes and Barry Posner surveyed thousands of people and…

Imagine you have Lou Gehrig’s disease. You know you are dying. But your struggle is made even more difficult by advocates who claim: 1) You should commit suicide if you want “death with dignity;” and, 2) Your society should help you do it. That was the circumstance in which my hospice patient–nay, good friend–Robert Salamanca found himself in the late…

Michael Landon, the hugely popular television star of Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie, and Highway to Heaven, died in 1991 at age fifty-four. Landon’s last act—if you will—was widely hailed as his best: He publicly announced his diagnosis with terminal pancreatic cancer, appeared on the Tonight Show to openly discuss his pending death with Johnny Carson (almost unprecedented back…

The San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Debra J. Saunders (my wife), has a really good piece out about the Brittany Maynard tragedy. The Hemlock Society Compassion and Choices wants to exploit her assisted suicide as a crow bar to pry open California and other states to legalizing doctor-prescribed death. That would be profoundly unwise, writes Debra. Source: Wesley J. Smith, nationalreview.com

Beware movements that word engineer and deploy gooey euphemisms to further their agenda. It generally means there is something very wrong with the agenda. In the wake of Brittany Maynard’s death, suicide promoters are now using the word “dignity” as a synonym for suicide, more than implying that dying naturally is not dignity. That is not only cruel, it is wrong.  Source: Wesley…

In a landmark decision last week, a federal judge in Oregon declared ‘secular humanism’ to be a religion, opining that those who profess to be atheists and secular humanists should be afforded equal protection rights under the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution and be allowed to enjoy the same liberties to practice religion that religious groups are able to…

In Tuesday’s elections, Republicans won control of the Senate and expanded their majority in the House. In the coming weeks and months, Republicans in Congress must focus on developing and pursuing a winning agenda over the next two years — an agenda that will help elect a Republican president in November 2016 and provide that president with a governing majority…

Memo to the GOP. You had a great night on Tuesday. But remember: You didn’t win it; the Democrats lost it. This is not to say that you didn’t show discipline in making the election a referendum on six years of Barack Obama. You exercised adult supervision over the choice of candidates. You didn’t allow yourselves to go down the…