Several pointed to Gutierrez’s case, in 2015: after she went to the police, negative items discussing her sexual history and impugning her credibility began rapidly appearing in New York gossip pages. (In the taped conversation with Gutierrez, Weinstein asks her to join him for “five minutes,” and warns, “Don’t ruin your friendship with me for five minutes.”)
.. Several pointed to Gutierrez’s case, in 2015: after she went to the police, negative items discussing her sexual history and impugning her credibility began rapidly appearing in New York gossip pages. (In the taped conversation with Gutierrez, Weinstein asks her to join him for “five minutes,” and warns, “Don’t ruin your friendship with me for five minutes.”)
.. We estimate that about 75 per cent of the child actors who ‘went off the rails’ suffered earlier abuse. Drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide attempts, wandering through life without a purpose — they can all be symptoms.”
Preaching Honestly In A Post-Christian World
One way of putting the truth would be that the religion which has declined was not Christianity. It was a vague Theism with a strong and virile ethical code
.. When no man goes to church except because he seeks Christ the number of actual believers can at last be discovered.
.. I am a senior/solo pastor in the PCA, a conservative, evangelical presbyterian denomination. My sense of our small church is that people (both on the left and right) are more despairing over America’s political state than its spiritual state.
I am in my early thirties. Those older than me seem to think that our church will start growing dramatically once we can get our techniques and programs and leadership “vision” dialed in. Growing a church like this has “worked” for a long time in evangelicalism, but I am not so sure that church growth can be produced so easily any more, or at least for much longer. Those younger than me, with some happy exceptions, seem to be spiritually adrift in the goo of MTD.
Criticism Of The Nashville Statement
The main criticism I’ve seen is that the statement wasn’t broad enough. It said nothing about divorce, pornography, unnatural sexual practices within marriage, and things like that. The complaint is that the statement singled out SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) for special criticism, when the truth is, Christian witness and discipleship is threatened by many other sexual sins. In sum, the Nashville Statement, the criticism goes, failed to repudiate the Sexual Revolution.
.. Do people really think that Wayne Grudem, John Piper, Al Mohler, and Russell Moore (among other signatories) are okay with pornography, no-fault divorce, and the rest? Come on.
.. First off, some of the sexual stuff doesn’t need saying. For example, no serious Evangelical theologian believes that porn is okay.
.. More broadly, SOGI poses a more radical challenge to orthodox Christianity than the other things do. Most of these other practices are in some way perversions of a norm, but not a denial of it. Leaving aside direct Scriptural prohibitions of same-sex conduct, SOGI in essence denies the sexual complementarity and gender essentialism intrinsic to Christian anthropology.
.. Now, Catholic critics who have pointed out that the acceptance of contraception is at the root of so much sexual disorder among Christians have a point. There are other questions having to do with the metaphysics of modernity that ought
.. Now, practically speaking, it is certainly true that far more Christian lives, marriages, and families are ruined by easy divorce, porn, and the rest. It’s wrong for heterosexual Christians to pluck the speck out of LGBT eyes, while ignoring the log in our own.
Buchanan’s Shameful Defense Of White Supremacy
I was stunned just now to read the disgusting, racist, indefensible thing that Pat Buchanan has written in his syndicated column in response to the Confederate statue controversy:
Looking back over the history of a Western Civilization, which we call great, were not the explorers who came out of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England all white supremacists?
They conquered in the name of the mother countries all the lands they discovered, imposed their rule upon the indigenous peoples, and vanquished and eradicated the native-born who stood in their way.
Who, during the centuries-long discovery and conquest of the New World, really believed that the lives of the indigenous peoples were of equal worth with those of the colonizers?
More:
“All men are created equal” is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?
With that, Buchanan repudiates not only the founding principle of our Constitutional order, but also a core teaching of the Christian faith, which holds that all men are created in the image of God. It is fine to disbelieve in egalitarianism as an ideology and as a basis for policy. Most conservatives do, and most conservatives rightly reject the idea that all cultures are equally good. And it is reasonable to argue against the puritan iconoclasts who would destroy monuments and historical memory in the name of a mindless, ideological dogmatism.
But that’s not what this is. Buchanan is not meditating on the tragic nature of history, as any conservative worth the name must do. No, in this column, Buchanan is defending white supremacy, straight up.