Recent Viewpoints

Penna Dexter As school ended this year, one northwest Washington DC educator commenced a summer project to try to pry students away from screen technology. She knows that, when school’s out, many of them have full access to cellphones, which are off limits during class time when school is in session. She worries that, rather than playing sports with friends or doing something like going to a museum, they’ll stay buried in screens all summer. The Washington Post reported that…

Kerby Anderson Is Christianity really as bad as atheists say that it is? For decades we have heard the charges from the new atheists. So we shouldn’t be surprised that many of those criticisms showed up at the 17th annual “White Privilege Conference” held last month in Philadelphia. Paul Kivel (founder of the Challenging Christian Hegemony Project) blamed Christianity for “almost every dysfunction in society, from racism and sexism to global warming and a weak economy.” He warns that the…

Kerby Anderson You have probably heard someone say that “if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.” It is attributed to Joseph Goebbels but we have all seen it in action. Say something long enough, and people start to believe it is true. I thought of that when I read the latest issue of Imprimis, which is published by Hillsdale College. It was a summary of a speech by former Sports Illustrated editor, Charles Leerhsen about the…

Kerby Anderson Most people would expect liberals to be open-minded, and yet they find that they are often the most intolerant. Kim Holmes explores the reasons for this transformation in his new book, The Closing of the Liberal Mind. He was on Point of View to talk about the history of the radical change in mindset and attitude. Classic American liberalism in this country was based on a belief in liberty. Citizens were to be free from government coercion and…

Kerby Anderson One of the cases rendered by the Supreme Court before the justices left town has great significance in terms of government programs and religious freedom. As I said in a commentary two months ago, tires and religious liberty don’t seem like topics that would go together. But a religious dispute over playground surfaces made its way to the Supreme Court and established a very important precedent. Trinity Lutheran Church in Missouri applied to a state grant program to…

Kerby Anderson One place where donors often go to check out a charity is GuideStar. Although it has been described as a “neutral” aggregator of tax data on charities, its latest actions call that designation into question. It originally placed “hate group” labels on certain groups so designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Southern Poverty Law Center at one time was respected for their work. But it has chosen to label many Christian and other conservative groups as…

Penna Dexter Right around the time we celebrate Independence Day, Canada celebrates Canada Day. July 1st marked 150 years since Canada became a self-governing dominion within the British Empire. The US has a longer history of independence. But when it comes to implementing radical social policy, Canada is outpacing the United States. Wisely, the US Defense Department decided last week to take a step back for a moment — actually six months — to look at whether it’s really a…

Kerby Anderson You have probably heard comments about certain people living in a bubble. They live in affluent communities cut off from some of the realities that most Americans face. Due to the research by Charles Murray, we can now identify where these bubble communities are located. In his book, Coming Apart, he argued that a high-IQ, highly educated upper class was formed over the last half century that is disconnected from the culture of mainstream America. Charles Murray put…

Kerby Anderson Pastor Ray Johnston has a new book out that talks about how the church has become like the culture. He illustrates this by describing the “seven decades that have changed everything.” We talked about these remarkable changes recently on Point of View The 1950s were a time when America lost its innocence. Rock music was born. Teenagers were liberated from the parents by cars. Every home got a television set. The 1960s were a time when America lost…

Kerby Anderson What does it take for normal people to start slaughtering others? A commentary in the Jerusalem Post with the title “The Genocide Mechanism” showed how demonization could lead to genocide. The writer talked about “a very specific kind of demonization.” The example he used was Rwanda. In 1994, the majority Hutu population was able to massacre some 800,000 Tutsis. The violence was unimaginable: neighbors slaughtering neighbors, mostly with machetes. The estimates are about 9,000 men, women, and children…

Kerby Anderson Today is the 4th of July, and I thought I would take a moment to talk about the origin of the ideas in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson said that many of the ideas in the Declaration came from John Locke. Jefferson also gave credit to the writer Algernon Sidney, who in turn cites most prominently Aristotle, Plato, Roman republican writers, and the Old Testament. Legal scholar Gary Amos argues that Locke’s Two Treatises on Government is…