Scrolling around...May 9, 2013

Dallas Willard (1935-2013): A Reader’s Appreciation
...Opening Willard’s book, I read: “The idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said.” In that sentence, I felt, was my diagnosis. I had grown up in an Evangelical Christian home, I “had faith in Jesus,” but what I didn’t have was a sense of how Jesus’ life connected to the practical problems I faced in my day-to-day existence. I had imbibed what Willard memorably calls a “gospel of sin management,” a message that enabled me to be confident of post-mortem salvation but left me largely clueless as to how to handle my troubles as a teenager...

Albert Mohler: Sneering at Parents, Hiding Behind “Science”—The Emergency Contraception Controversy
Looking for evidence that our society is losing its mind? Just look at the controversy over so-called “emergency contraceptives” and a federal judge’s effort to make these drugs available, over the counter, to girls of any age.

Last month, Judge Edward Korman of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York handed down an order forcing the Food and Drug Administration to make emergency contraceptives, sometimes called the “morning-after pill,” available without a doctor’s prescription or parental permission to girls without any restriction on age.

Judge Korman’s order would open the door for girls as young as 10 or 11 to obtain the morning-after pill without any involvement by either a doctor or a parent. That same girl, of course, could not be given an aspirin in a school clinic without parental permission, much less a simple antibiotic like penicillin. Nevertheless, this federal judge ruled that girls and women of any age must be allowed over-the-counter access to emergency contraceptives...

The Vivid Images of Pope Francis

One of the more remarkable aspects of Francis’ pontificate has been his rhetorical style. Whereas Benedict XVI generally spoke in carefully crafted Latin paragraphs, Pope Francis has adopted a more casual style of Italian—often speaking without prepared notes. Most notable of all, Francis has gone about coining striking phrases that capture spiritual concepts in contemporary terms...

China may not overtake America this century after all
Doubts are growing about whether China can pass the US to become the world's biggest economy this century amid warnings that the country’s 30-year miracle is nearing exhaustion...

'Stop Being a Baby'-Infanticide and the infantilization of women
...All beliefs and intuitions about whether and when abortion is moral or immoral amount to a priori assumptions, although one hopes such assumptions would be informed by an informed understanding of reproductive biology. If you do not think abortion is immoral, it follows that a woman who seeks or obtains an abortion is not morally culpable. To put it more precisely, it follows that seeking or obtaining an abortion cannot be a sufficient condition for moral culpability.

But Myers is making a far broader claim. He is asserting that a woman's seeking an abortion is sufficient to establish that she is not culpable for any consequences that proximately result from her "choice," including the deliberate killing, after birth, of the baby she sought to abort. Myers is, in other words, positing that women who seek abortions are categorically free of culpability.

That is the sort of moral immunity we normally extend to persons who lack the capacity to understand either the consequences of their actions or the difference between right and wrong: very young children, extreme mental defectives and, more controversially, the severely mentally ill. In absolving women seeking abortions of all moral culpability, then, Myers is infantalizing them. Yet even Myers's dubious premise, that women seeking abortions are innocent by definition, does not lead to his monstrous conclusion, that Gosnell is innocent...
Celebrated abortionist Carhart jokes about breaking babies apart with pickaxes and drill bits

Late-Term Abortion Doc Caught Comparing Unborn Baby to “Meat in a Crock Pot”

The mass exodus of Christians from the Muslim world
A mass exodus of Christians is currently underway. Millions of Christians are being displaced from one end of the Islamic world to the other.

We are reliving the true history of how the Islamic world, much of which prior to the Islamic conquests was almost entirely Christian, came into being.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recently said: “The flight of Christians out of the region is unprecedented and it’s increasing year by year.” In our lifetime alone “Christians might disappear altogether from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt.”...