Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson When President Everett Piper wrote his commentary about an incident on his campus, he had no idea that it would go viral (with 3.5 million views). He told the story about one of the students who felt victimized after a university chapel by a sermon on 1 Corinthians 13, often known as the “love chapter” in Paul’s epistle. He explained the philosophy at Oklahoma Wesleyan University and ended it by saying, “This is not a day care. This…

Penna Dexter Because Americans did not participate or behave the way the planners of ObamaCare had expected, here we are in 2017 with an individual health insurance market that is collapsing. Insurance companies have to decide whether to drop out or raise premiums to stay in business. Members of Congress are desperate to keep premiums from rising. Yet the idea of bailing out insurance companies is politically unpalatable. The Left dangles its solution: Why not take the insurance company out…

Kerby Anderson When a Hollywood celebrity testifies before Congress, usually there is lots of fawning press coverage but very little of substance that can influence public policy. At the House Oversight Committee hearing on “Challenges to Freedom of Speech on College Campuses,” you had just the opposite. Some important things were said but it received little press coverage. Perhaps that is due to the fact that conservative pundit Ben Shapiro and comedian Adam Carolla were testifying. Adam Carolla talked about…

Kerby Anderson Philip Yancey begins with an admission: “I am going through a personal crisis.” He explains that he used to love reading. In fact, he understands that “books help define who I am.” But that is his past not his present. He has discovered that the Internet and social media have trained his brain “to read a paragraph or two, and than start looking around.” When he is reading an article online pretty soon he is looking at the…

Kerby Anderson Preseason football has arrived, and one of the big questions is, how political will football players be this year? David French in a recent commentary observed that, “When players get political, it turns out that fans can get political right back.” The market-research company J.D. Power surveyed 9,200 fans. They found that “national anthem protests were the top reason that NFL fans watched fewer games last season.” Previous polls of fans (like the Reuters poll) came to similar…

Kerby Anderson Congress will once again take up the issue of tax reform. Although many of us would love for our taxes to be easy to calculate and simple to file, we know that won’t happen in the near future. What can be done? The editors of the Wall Street Journal published a few principles we can use to evaluate the current debate about tax reform. First, there should be a priority on growth. “After 12 years of a lackluster…

Kerby Anderson One of the reasons Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell postponed the August recess was due to “the backlog of critical nominations” he said “that have been mindlessly stalled by Democrats.” Of course, nearly every administration and party in power complains at some time about the slow process of confirming nominations. But what is happening right now is unprecedented. During the first six months of President Trump’s administration, he made 257 nominations to important governmental position in his administration…

Penna Dexter The sad news of the death of 11-month- old Charlie Gard sparked something in my memory. Charlie Gard is the British baby who died last week after an unsuccessful months-long battle his parents fought with the British Health Service to take him to the U.S. for treatment. I rifled through some old posters and found what I was looking for — a poster that contains a picture of my husband and me in straight-jackets, blindfolded, with our mouths…

Kerby Anderson What if Christians and Christian institutions that provide so many social services went on strike? That is a question Addison Del Mastro asks in The American Conservative. He reminds us of the book by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged. She poses the question of what would happen if entrepreneurs in America decided to go on strike because of an increasingly overbearing regulatory state. The book documents the dystopia the country falls into. While I doubt that Christians and Christian…

Kerby Anderson Cal Thomas begins his column by recounting his visit to Singapore a few years ago. He asked the cab driver about the unemployment rate. He was shocked to hear it was fewer than two percent. What was the reason for such a low rate? “We don’t have any welfare here,” the cab driver responded. “If you are able-bodied and don’t work, the government doesn’t send you a check.” The apostle Paul writes in 2 Thessalonians 3:10 that, “If…

Kerby Anderson The Trump administration has been rolling back federal regulations at a significant rate. One report estimates that deregulation has removed more than 800 regulations. This would include 469 planned regulatory actions that were part of the Obama administration’s regulatory agenda and another 391 active regulatory proceedings actions that were reclassified as long-term or inactive. You may remember that Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for a regulatory freeze. He also signed an executive order that required an…