Recent Viewpoints

Penna Dexter With unemployment at a low 4.1 percent, businesses are complaining that they can’t find enough workers. The WALL STREET JOURNAL says the shortage is due, in part, to “government benefits that corrode a culture of work.” Consider SNAP, the nation’s food stamp program. More than 40 million Americans are in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. That’s up from 17 million in 2000. Since then, the size of benefits and total cost of the program have exploded. Between 2000…

Kerby Anderson Dr. Anne Bradley has been on my radio program and in one of her articles, she talks about her first trip to the Soviet Union. Even as a teenager she could see through the attempt to make Russia look more prosperous than it was. In fact, her visit was one of the reasons she became an economist. She ends her article by telling the true story of what happened when Boris Yeltsin visited the United States. He was…

Kerby Anderson Americans in general, and even evangelicals in particular, seem confused about important details of their faith. A study done by Lifeway Research found that Americans don’t know much about theology, and many evangelicals seem confused as well. Tyler O’Neil wrote about the “12 Lies American Evangelicals Believe.” Here are a few of them. Americans generally believe that their personal salvation depends on good works. The survey found that three-fourths (77%) agreed with the statement that people must contribute…

Kerby Anderson Dr. Tim Keller was on my radio program to talk about his new book, Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical. In many ways, it was a prequel to his earlier apologetics book, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. His earlier book (The Reason for God) deals with two large issues: doubt and the reasons for faith. For the skeptic, he attempts to answer the major questions that keep skeptics from biblical…

Kerby Anderson If you think about it, your life is the culmination of lots and lots of decisions. Jim Clifton, CEO of Gallup, argues that people make 10,000 to 20,000 small decisions every day. If you multiply this by the US population you end up with one quadrillion decisions. This is one of the points Jeff Myers makes in his book, Understanding the Culture. The legacy you leave is the sum of all of these decisions. Many are inconsequential. Others…

Kerby Anderson No doubt you have heard the phrase, “politics is downstream from culture.” It is a way of explaining that what is at stake in our world often begins upstream in the culture. Popular culture is all around us and delivered to us through broadcast media and social media. We perceive the world through news reports, through movies, through entertainment programs, and through music. Every form of communication has a message. Sometimes it is blatant and intentional. Often it…

Penna Dexter The US Centers for Disease Control has declared April STD Awareness month. They cite the latest data to point out that Sexually Transmitted Diseases are at record levels and that young people, for behavioral and biological reasons, are at high risk of contracting STDs. The CDC’s plan of action is “Talk, Test, and Treat.” OK. But how about let’s tell kids that sexual promiscuity can be dangerous, even lethal. Be clear with them that they should practice restraint…

Kerby Anderson I often say on my radio program that we spend millions of dollars each year in research studies to validate what most mothers already know. That is certainly the case with the studies attempting to explain why certain people procrastinate. Andrew Santella writes about this in his book, Soon: An Overdue History of Procrastination, From Leonardo and Darwin to You and Me. He explains “The Real Reason You Procrastinate” in a recent article in Time magazine. People who…

Kerby Anderson The Constitution mandates a survey of Americans every decade. And the Commerce Secretary has discretion over the questions that census takers must ask. In most administrations, that would be the end of it. But Donald Trump is the president, and so just about everything that is proposed in his administration is controversial. The Justice Department asked census officials to include a question about citizenship, so they can better enforce the Voting Rights Act. Including such a question was…

Kerby Anderson Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens stirred up a discussion about the Second Amendment when he published an op-ed in The New York Times that called for the repeal of the Second Amendment. Most of the reaction centered on the fact that it would be nearly impossible. The amendment process set forth in the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate or by a convention of states called for by…

Kerby Anderson Do we see a pattern in these school shootings? Emilie Kao recently wrote about “The Crisis of Fatherless Shooters.” She says there is a sobering theme found in the biographies of school shooters: fatherlessness. “Of the 25 most-cited school shooters since Columbine, 75 percent were reared in broken homes. Psychologist Dr. Peter Langman, a pre-eminent expert on school shooters, found that most came from incredibly broken homes of not just divorce and separation, but also infidelity, substance abuse,…