Recent Viewpoints

If you can’t enact gun control through Congress, then perhaps you can achieve the same effect by banning certain types of ammo. That seems to be the strategy being used by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). A spokesman for the National Rifle Association put it this way: “The Obama Administration was unable to ban America’s most popular sporting rifle through the legislative process, so now its trying to ban commonly owned and used ammunition through regulation.”…

Recent articles and announcements remind us how dangerous ISIS has become, and why we should pay more attention to these radical Muslim terrorists that used to be described as merely a JV team. Graeme Wood’s article in The Atlantic explains “What ISIS Really Wants.” He says “that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its…

We talk about the threat gay marriage poses to the institution of marriage. But what’s happening to gray marriage. Marriage in the over 50 set isn’t as stable as it used to be. A Wall Street Journal spread entitled “Gray Divorcés” points out that,    “For the new generation of empty nesters, divorce is increasingly common.” The overall divorce rate spiked in the 1980’s and has been dropping ever since. But divorce in couples over 50 is higher than ever. In…

While reading the book, The Happy Christian, I came across the story of Professor Jack Chambliss at Valencia College. Each year he begins the class by asking his students to write a ten-minute essay on what the American dream looks like to them and what they want the federal government to do to help them achieve that dream. I would recommend that you ask young people you know to do the same. I think you will be shocked. The professor…

Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is a Muslim and the president of Egypt. He grew up in the midst of the Muslim world and in the world’s center of Sharia scholarship. So when he called for a religious revolution within Islam, his words had great significance. In his speech in Cairo’s premier center of religious learning, he called for a change and revolution. He argued that Islam is in “need of a religious revolution. You imams are responsible before Allah. The entire…

Yesterday I talked about how some commentators have been trying to minimize the threat from terrorism. Today I would like to talk about how others are trying to minimize Muslim terrorism. The most common method is familiar to all of us. Don’t use the word Muslim when talking about terrorism. Our nation’s foreign policy sounds like something from a Harry Potter book. We are fighting “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” It will be hard to win a war on terrorism if you cannot describe…

I have noticed over the last few months that a number of commentators have been trying to minimize the threat from terrorism. Perhaps they are doing it because they don’t want us to over-react to the social media videos of burnings and beheadings. Some may not want America to be drawn into another war.  Whatever the reason, there seems to be a concerted effort to minimize the terrorist threat. One writer calculated that since 9/11, “a grand total of 30…

Last week the issue of wage equity was in the news. First, it was the Oscar speech by Patricia Arquette that seemed to come out of nowhere. She said that it’s “time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America.” This was followed by an investigative story that reminded future voters that the women in Senator Hillary Clinton’s office were paid less than the men working in her office….

A new study of United States Census data shows that 30.3 percent of millennials, young adults ages 18-34, are still living with their parents. The report is called “Young Adults: Then and Now.” It pulls together Census numbers showing that, since 1980, the slice of the population in this age group that still lived with their parents hovered around 22 to 24 percent. But, between 2009 and 2013 the percentage of millennials still living at home shot up and is…

Americans have been watching the influence of Islam in Europe and in the Middle East and wonder what might happen in this country. One way to consider the potential influence of Islam is to look at the book by Peter Hammond, Slavery, Terrorism, and Islam. Most people have never read the book, but they probably have seen in an email one of the most quoted parts of the book. He argues that when the Muslim population is under 2 percent…

In many ways the culture is turning against Christian values, and that is why all of us who call ourselves Christians needs to demonstrate to the watching world the truthfulness of the gospel. We can do that both with our words and with our works. Sociologist Rodney Stark in his book, The Rise of Christianity, said: “Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent urban problems….