Restoring the Shattered
It’s the type of book you might read “for a friend because nothing like that would ever happen to me.” Even so, 70 percent of men use porn. One in six women struggles with addiction to porn. Being part of the Church doesn’t exempt us when 50 percent of pastors use porn too. Porn is …
Continue reading “Happily Even After: Let God Redeem Your Marriage”
Published in the Mustard Seed Sentinel, Saturday, April 23, 2022 “And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction,” Malachi 4:6 (ESV). “A society based on ‘agape’ [sacrificial love] alone is all very well, …
Continue reading “HEADlines: No Other Way”
Published in The Mustard Seed Sentinel, August 28, 2021~ Covenant: “a formal agreement or contract, between God and humans or between two human parties to do or refrain from doing something. Sometimes only one party was responsible to carry out the terms (a unilateral covenant, which was essentially a promise). At other times both parties …
Continue reading “HEADlines: Love or Lust”
Pornography is “so focused on yourself, you don’t even have another person. . . . [It] is everything the Bible says is not what sex is supposed to be.” Dr. Tim Keller I remember a college class called science, technology, and society, actually a philosophy class, in which the professor posited that the images we …
Continue reading “Love, Lust, Porn and the Church”
“What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.”― Marcus Tullius Cicero In Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Fantine is a single mother who loses …
Continue reading “Normalizing Porn”
Published in Mustard Seed Sentinel, August 22, 2020. When the Roman Empire collapsed, the loss of basic knowledge of how to do ordinary things was immense. The Oxford historian Bryan Ward-Perkins [says] that it took western Europeans something like 700 years to relearn how to build a roof as solid as the Romans knew how …
Continue reading “The Upside-Down World Is Becoming Our Own”
“People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is …
Continue reading “Finding Each Other Again”
In When Breath Becomes Air, neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi tells the story of a patient who insisted on having a brain tumor removed against the advice of his surgeons. The tumor was situated in a critical speech center in the brain. Excising it was likely to render the patient speechless for life. Kalanithi was about to …
Continue reading “Shaping our brains; shaping our souls”
“A growing number of young men are convinced that their sexual responses have been sabotaged because their brains were virtually marinated in porn when they were adolescents. Their generation has consumed explicit content in quantities and varieties never before possible, on devices designed to deliver content swiftly and privately, all at an age when their …
Continue reading “Pushing Back Against Pornography”
Sometimes, life crushes those wings. Crushed spirits can only watch others fly.