"It is the test of good religion," G. K. Chesterton wrote, "whether you can joke about it." If the reactions of religion's proponents is any judge, Judaism and Christianity fair pretty well. Islam—at least a large segment of Islam—doesn't think its very funny.
Os Guinness put it well in The Global Public Square: Religious Freedom and the Making of a World Safe for Diversity: "How do we live with our deepest differences, especially when those differences are religious and ideological, and especially when those differences concern matters of our common public life?"
On a beautiful New England morning I was driving from Boston to Rhode Island to visit a client. The morning air was crisp and fresh. The sun had just enough warmth to keep the chill at bay. The sky was a stunning hue of blue. It was one of those days that made you wish you worked outside. That is how the morning of September 11, 2001, began. It ended in ugliness and rubble - and 3,000 of our fellow citizens dead.
In The Person Called You: Why You're Here, Why You Matter & What You Should Do with Your Life, Hendricks tackles, with vim and vigor, the thorny philosophical underpinnings of purpose.
The history of America is the history of liberty. As a course of events, American history is progresstoward liberty. As a record of those events, American history is progress toward understanding liberty.
Franklin D. Roosevelt perfected the art of speaking directly to the American people. Unlike presidents before him, the invention and availability of the radio allowed Americans from New York to California to hear his voice—all at the same time. The radio transformed America in the 1930s and '40s, and transformed presidential politics.
Settled law. That's what we were told Obamacare was. But there's nothing settled about it, which is what makes it so unsettling—from the Supreme Court's ruling that the government can compel citizens to engage in commerce (thereby delegitimizing the people's liberty), to the amateurish rollout of the health care website, to Congress excusing themselves from the law, to the (thus far) twenty-nine changes, exemptions, and cut outs President Obama has implemented without congressional approval.
It matters not that biologists have never observed or duplicated mutations, even in the simplest organism, to produce a whole new species. It matters not that paleontologists have never discovered transitional or mutated species in the fossil record. In today's world, Darwinian evolution is the faith that trumps all others.
The stage for the first Christmas was set by a politician—Caesar Augustus. The backdrop was a political policy: a census of the Roman Empire—"of all the inhabited earth," in the words of Luke 2:1. Everyone knows the story.