Moral issues

The Search For Meaning

The Search For Meaning in Lifeby Dan Doyle –
Suffering comes into every life. Often it is so terrible we wonder how we can ever survive it. We can’t imagine the there could be any meaning in it. One of the most important books I’ve ever read is Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” In it he tells of his experiences as an inmate in several of the Nazi death camps during WWII. Frankl was one of the lucky ones, he survived. He was liberated at the end of the war from Auchwitz as the only survivor of his family. Out of his pain and loss, out of the hell of it all, he came away with a deeper faith in God and, ironically, in humanity. We are the lucky ones, then, who can read this small book and be edified by the powerful meaning he discovered in and through his own suffering.

When we suffer, nothing makes sense to us. We are overwhelmed with a feeling that the world is cold, indifferent to our suffering, that we are utterly alone in it and imprisoned by it. How could there be any meaning in it at all? This is the central question of Viktor Frankl’s book. The core responsibility of our individual human lives is to find meaning and purpose, not just in fame, or wealth, but in transcendent ways, through faith, hope and, most importantly through love. [Read more…]

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The Price of Gay Marriage: The Galvanic Corrosion of Language

Defend Marriage Religionby Geoffrey P. Hunt –
When was that watershed moment where advocacy of gay marriage crossed into the mainstream from the radical chic of the intellectual elite ? Gay marriage, quite apart from homosexuality per se, has only in recent years been embraced by more than just a few libertarian sophisticates. Ironically it wasn’t too long ago when the progressive darlings and the beautiful people believed, to the contrary, that marriage of any kind was oppressive, a form of institutional bondage.

One of the more incomprehensible aspects of the gay marriage movement has been the spectacle of well-educated academics, plaintiff’s lawyers, politicians, judges and Protestant clergymen designing tortured arguments for deconstructing natural law, human biology, the history of civilization, language and logic. On the other hand, creating a new class of civil rights amidst claims of discrimination is easy when your world view equates justice with moral equivalence, accompanied by enabling the slow corruption of language. [Read more…]

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Conference on Poverty, St. Vlad’s Seminary, May 31-June 1, 2013

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for life!”

Jay Richards
Jay Richards
Susan R. Holman
Susan R. Holman
Conference presenters will be Jay Richards, author of Money, Greed, and God and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute; and Susan R. Holman, senior writer at Harvard Global Health Institute, and author of The Hungry are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia and God Knows There’s Need: Christian Responses to Poverty, both from Oxford University Press.

View Acton Institute’s engaging videos from “PovertyCure,” an international coalition of organizations and individuals committed to entrepreneurial solutions to poverty that challenge the status quo and champion the creative potential of the human person. [Read more…]

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Environmentalism and Human Sacrifice

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager
by Dennis Prager –
Last week, Bjorn Lomborg, the widely published Danish professor and director of one of the world’s leading environmental think tanks, the Copenhagen Consensus Center, published an article about the Philippines’ decision, after 12 years, to allow genetically modified (GM) rice — “golden rice” — to be grown and consumed in that country.

The reason for the delay was environmentalist opposition to GM rice; and the reason for the change in Philippine policy was that 4.4 million Filipino children suffer from vitamin A deficiency. That deficiency, Lomborg writes, “according to the World Health Organization, causes 250,000 to 500,000 children to go blind each year. Of these, half die within a year.”

During the 12-year delay, Lomborg continues, “About eight million children worldwide died from vitamin A deficiency.” [Read more…]

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Please Do Not Adjust Your Child

Indoctrination of Childrenby Daren Jonescu –
Of all the arguments public-school advocates have used to hoodwink generations of parents into condemning their own children to years of state-controlled subservience training, one of the most successful is that without public schools, children cannot be properly “socialized,” and will therefore be ill-prepared for life in the “real world.” Not only is this argument absurd on its face, but that face also reveals the ugliest intention of compulsory schools: the deliberate retarding of human moral and intellectual development.

The basic premise of the argument for public schools as necessary tools of socialization is that learning to get along, or fit in, with children one’s own age is a vital life skill. Is it?

Childhood, contrary to the worst tendencies of democratic thought, is not [Read more…]

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The Image of God and the Dignity of Work

The Image of God and the Dignity of Workby Art Lindsley –
The number one fear of the millennial generation is living a meaningless life.

In a recent informal survey of undergraduate students at Regent University, 27 percent of students asked expressed anxiety when considering their vocation. “Scared,” “uneasy,” “unsure,” “confused,” and “apprehensive” were common words in describing the way they felt about their future vocation.

But college students aren’t the only ones struggling with their calling. Many adults fail to discover their calling in life, too. Why is it so hard to find this thing we call our “vocation”?

When I use the words “calling” and “vocation,” I am referring to what Os Guinness calls our secondary calling. As Guinness points out, along with Luther, Calvin, and many other Reformers, our primary calling is the call to faith in Christ. Several secondary callings flow from this primary calling, including the call to work. [Read more…]

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If Good and Evil Exist, God Must Exist (Prager University)

If Good and Evil Exist, God Existsby Peter Kreeft-
Is there such a thing as objective morality? If there is, does that suggest a moral law giver? Peter Kreeft, distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Boston College, takes on these critical questions and offers some challenging answers.

“Good and evil are not the difference between I like and I don’t like,” observes Professor Kreeft in this video lecture. He conducts a thorough review of the five (5) theoretical sources of morality offered by atheists, and disproves each one using logic, common sense, and historical examples: [Read more…]

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New York City Schools Give 12,721 Abortion Pills to Young Girls

Public Schools Abortion Pills to Childrenby By Jessica Chasmar –
New York City schools are offering young girls a full menu of birth control options, free of parental counsel, thanks to an unpublicized project by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration.

School nurses handed out 12,721 doses of the Plan B One-Step “morning-after” pill in 2011-12, up from 10,720 in 2010-11 and 5,039 in 2009-10, the New York Post reports.

Mona Davids, president of the NYC Parents Union, was stunned by the report. [Read more…]

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Should Government Coerce Charity?

Christian Charity Voluntary, Real Charity Cannot Be Coerced by Joel J. Miller –
When it comes to the question of social justice, there is more at play than the needs of the poor. Charity requires not only a recipient but also a giver, and that increases the issue’s moral complexity.

From the earliest days of the church, care for the poor was central. It’s there in the New Testament writings, in Christ’s own words even. It’s there in the Didache, which directs Christians to spend time with the lowly (3.9) and give their firstfruits to the poor (13.4). And great pastors and preachers like Basil the Great spoke often and forcefully on the matter.

“How many precepts you ignore, since your ears are plugged with avarice!” said Basil in one sermon, adding, “if we all took only what was necessary to satisfy our own needs, giving the rest to those who lack, no one would be rich, no one would be poor, and no one would be in need” (I Will Tear Down My Barns 6, 7). [Read more…]

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Not Sermons but Stories – Engaging in Culture the Right Way

Christians Engaging Culture Through Stories by Eric Metaxas –
If you’ve read The Chronicles of Narnia, you know they are loaded with Christian themes and symbols. That’s why many assume that C. S. Lewis wrote them in order to send some kind of Christian message.

But Lewis himself insisted otherwise. The tales, he said, started as a series of pictures that came into his mind and set his imagination working. The result was not sermons, but stories—beautiful stories loved by believers and non-believers alike for decades.

There’s a lesson in here for all of us. Conservative Christians today often feel alienated from the larger society, and for good reason. The vast majority of the stories that permeate our culture are told by people whose worldview is diametrically opposed to ours. We can hardly watch a TV show or read a magazine without seeing ourselves portrayed as villains, and our cultural opponents held up as the epitome of righteousness. [Read more…]

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