Ted Cruz & Ronald Reagan’s Political Bible Verse

Five candidates can plausibly imagine themselves taking the oath of office. “Left hand on the Bible, right hand in the air,” Rubio told his supporters, pantomiming the scene, inviting them to imagine it. Ted Cruz went further, specifying the very Bible verse that his finger would rest on: 2 Chronicles 7:14. The same one, of course, as Ronald Reagan.

Context:

12 Then the Lord appeared to Solomon by night, and said to him: “I have heard your prayer, and have chosen this place for Myself as a house of sacrifice. 13 When I shut up heaven and there is no rain, or command the locusts to devour the land, or send pestilence among My people,

Ronald Reagan & Ted Cruz’s verse:

14 if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

Jesus’s view of drought in Matthew 5:44-46

44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?

 

 

.. Cruz works in a very narrow range—he is either a crusader for the religious right in the culture wars or a crusader for the libertarian right in the anti-government wars—but he knows all of its dimensions. Yesterday, adapting to the place, he emphasized the libertarianism.

 

The Blogger and the Mechanical Bull

“Research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links”

As a group of Northwestern University professors wrote in a 2005 article in the Annual Review of Sociology, the recent changes in our reading habits suggest that the “era of mass [book] reading” was a brief “anomaly” in our intellectual history: “We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.” The question that remains to be answered, they went on, is whether that reading class will have the “power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capitol” or will be viewed as the eccentric practitioners of “an increasingly arcane hobby.” (108)
.. what does all this research suggest about our ability to meditate on Scripture and the preached Word?

David Bebbington: Bebbington’s Quadralateral

Bebbington is widely known for his definition of evangelicalism, referred to as the “Bebbington quadrilateral”, which was first provided in his 1989 classic study Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s.[1] Bebbington identifies four main qualities which are to be used in defining evangelical convictions and attitudes:[2]

  • biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible (e.g. all essential spiritual truth is to be found in its pages)
  • crucicentrism, a focus on the atoning work of Christ on the cross
  • conversionism, the belief that human beings need to be converted
  • activism, the belief that the gospel needs to be expressed in effort