Current Affairs and Causes on Modern Life

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Scripture

Genesis 4:6-7 , Ecclesiastes 2:10-11, Daniel 3:16-18, Romans 12:1-2 , Luke 9:23-24 , Psalm 73:25-26

Modern man is a bleak business. To our chagrin we discover that the declaration of autonomy has issued not in a race of free, masterly men, but rather in a race that can be described by its poets and ...

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Modern Parents Need Help with Technology

Author

Andy Crouch

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Scripture

Deuteronomy 11:18-19, Proverbs 22:6 , Exodus 20:8-10, Matthew 6:33, Romans 12:2, Psalm 119:37

If there is one word that sums up how many of us feel about technology and family life, it’s Help! Parents know we need help. We love the way devices make our lives easier amid the stress and busy...

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Trying to Keep Up with the Jones’ in the 21st Century

Author

David Zahl

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Scripture

Exodus 18:13–27, Ecclesiastes 2:22–23 , Isaiah 40:28–31 , Luke 10:38–42, Matthew 11:28–30, Psalm 127:1–2

The picture shows cartoon villain Cruella de Vil, bloodshot eyes staring straight ahead, hands clutching the wheel of her infamous coupe, black-and-white hair waving wildly in the wind, oversi...

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Tech is Too Easy

Author

Andy Crouch

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Scripture

Genesis 11:1-9 , Exodus 32:1-6 , Ecclesiastes 1:9-10, Matthew 6:19-21 , Romans 1:21-25, Psalm 115:4-8

Now, technology is everywhere. I don’t mean just glowing screens and digital devices; I mean the whole apparatus of “easy everywhere” that has come into existence in just over the span of one human li...

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The Most Powerful Choices in our Lives

Author

Andy Crouch

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Scripture

Deuteronomy 6:6-9, Daniel 6:10, Proverbs 4:23-27, Psalm 119:9-11, Romans 12:1-2, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27

The most powerful choices we will make in our lives are not about specific decisions but about patterns of life: the nudges and disciplines that will shape all our other choices. This is especially tr...

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The CNN Effect

Author

Ryan Holiday

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Scripture

Philippians 4:8, Romans 12:2, Luke 21:34, Psalm 46:10, Matthew 6:22-23

In the 1990s, political scientists began to study what they called the “CNN Effect.” Breathless, twenty-four-hour media coverage makes it considerably harder for politicians and CEOs to be anything bu...

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The Paradox of Technology

Author

Andy Crouch

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 11:1-9 , Exodus 32:1-6, Isaiah 44:9-20 , Matthew 4:1-4 , 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, Psalm 20:7

Here is the heart of the paradox: Technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world. But it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who ca...

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What is the Internet? Yesterday's Confusion is Today's Assumption

Author

JR Woodward

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Scripture

Isaiah 40:8, Hebrews 13:8, James 1:17, Matthew 24:35, Colossians 2:8

A YouTube video from the Today Show in 1994 shows Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric asking each other “What is the Internet?” and debating if the “@” symbol means “at” or “about.” The world is very diffe...

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The Most Damaging Charge

Author

Richard J. Mouw

Keywords

Scripture

Leviticus 19:15, Proverbs 18:17, 1 Kings 3:9, Matthew 7:1–5, John 7:24, Psalm 141:5

At a recent gathering of seminary professors, one teacher reported that at his school the most damaging charge one student can lodge against another is that the person is being “judgmental.” He found ...

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Jesus Caught in the Middle of Modern Society

Author

N. T. Wright

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Scripture

Isaiah 53:3–5, Daniel 3:16–18, Micah 6:6–8, Matthew 23:23–24, Luke 4:16–30, Psalm 2:1

Jesus, as always, gets caught in the middle—along with a good number of his followers. Many people in America today were brought up in strict Christian homes and churches of one sort or another. There...

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Living with Pain in a World Governed by Technique

Author

Alan Noble

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 11:1-9, Exodus 16:13-36, Ecclesiastes 1:12-18, Luke 10:38-42, 2 Corinthians 12:7-10, Psalm 127:1-2

Living in a society governed by technique conditions us to believe that in every way life is easier than it ever has been. Technique is the use of rational methods to maximize efficiency, and we...

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Statistics on Religion in America: The Rise of the None's

Author

JR Woodward

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Scripture

Matthew 7:13-14, 2 Timothy 4:3-4, Luke 18:8, 2 Corinthians 4:3-4, Matthew 24:12-13

In March 2009, we received the results from the widest religious survey conducted in the United States, the ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey) study. There is much to gain from this repor...

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Deconstruction is trending

Author

Ian Harber

Keywords

Scripture

2 Timothy 4:3-4, Colossians 2:8, Acts 20:30, Matthew 24:11, Ephesians 4:14, Numbers 16:

Deconstruction isn’t a trendy thing to do, but it is a trend that is happening at scale in our country and passing from person to person. Anecdotally, when I look up various hashtags on TikTok, th...

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Author

G. K. Chesterton

Keywords

The modern world has had far too little understanding of the art of keeping young. Its notion of progress has been to pile one thing on top of another, without caring if each thing was crushed in turn...

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The Progress Paradox

Author

Andrew M. Davis

Keywords

Yet despite all of these advancements, we are more discontent than ever. Gregg Easterbrook wrote a book on this very topic entitled The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. ...

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Author

Christianity Today

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Scripture

Deuteronomy 6:6-7 , Proverbs 22:6, Joshua 24:15, Matthew 19:13-14 , Ephesians 6:4, Psalm 78:4-7

About 2 out of 3 American adults who regularly attend church or other religious services say they go for their kids.

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Defending the Truth

Author

Richard J. Mouw

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Scripture

Exodus 20:16 , Zechariah 8:16–17, Leviticus 19:17–18, Ephesians 4:15, Romans 12:17–18, Psalm 15:1–3

I once had the opportunity to speak briefly to a large Mormon audience at the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. I told them that I feel badly about the fact that we evangelicals often tell Mormons what th...

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The Birth (or Re-Emergence) of Evangelical Social Action

Author

Soong-Chan Rah

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In 1947, budding theologian Carl F. H. Henry wrote a short book titled The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. In it he surveys the American fundamentalist movement’s engagement with the most ...

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Author

Rod Dreher

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Scripture

Exodus 16:1-36, 1 Kings 17:8-16, Ecclesiastes 3:1-13, Matthew 6:25-34 , Colossians 3:23-24, Psalm 118:24

Everydayness is my problem. It’s easy to think about what you would do in wartime, or if a hurricane blows through, or if you spent a month in Paris, or if your guy wins the election, or if you won th...

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St. Valentine & The Origin of Being “Your” Valentine

Author

Ben Lansing and D. J.Marotta

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Scripture

1 Kings 17:17–24, Isaiah 6:8, Exodus 24:3–4, John 15:12–13 , Acts 13:46–49, Psalm 119:105

[Saint] Valentine was a priest in Rome when Emperor Claudius II began his hostile reign. Valentine was arrested for performing Christian weddings. While imprisoned, Valentine befriended the jailer’s d...

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The Cross and the Lynching Tree

Author

James Cone

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 61:1, Jeremiah 22:3, Micah 6:8, James 1:27, Matthew 25:35-36, Psalm 82:3-4, Isaiah 58:6-7

In the wake of slavery and the Civil War, there was so much ugliness in black life that one would have had to be blind not to see it. And nothing, absolutely nothing, was uglier than lynching in all o...

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Author

Ken Myers

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[Suffering] may be as serious for modern Christians as persecution and plagues were for the saints of earlier centuries… it is the burden of living in a consumer culture where the individual looms lar...

liturgy

Prayer for our Country

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Scripture

James 1:5, 1 Timothy 2:8, 1 Timothy 2:1-2, Proverbs 29:2, 2 Chronicles 7:14

Modern Language Version Almighty God, who has given us this good land for our heritage: We humbly ask that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of your favor and glad to do your will. Bles...

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Six Factors Impacting our Understanding of Christ and Culture

Author

D. A. Carson

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We have the same biblical texts that earlier generations of Christians thought their way through, of course, but our reflections are shaped by six unique factors. (1) Especially in the Anglo-Saxon wo...

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Christian Persecution & The Real Power

Author

John Dickson

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 5:10-12, John 15:18-20, 2 Timothy 3:12, Acts 14:22, Romans 8:35-37, 1 Peter 4:12-14, 2 Corinthians 12:9-10, Acts 1:8, Romans 8:11, Isaiah 41:10

What is the witness of the church in times of persecution? The historical record demonstrates that persecutions of Christians were regular and prolific in the first centuries of the church, especially...

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Approaches to Mental Health are not Enough

Author

Caroline Leaf

Keywords

Modern psychological and psychiatric approaches to mental health, particularly the use of drugs like antidepressants and antipsychotics, don’t address the complexity of the human mind. Indeed, they ha...

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Modern-day Slaves

Author

Andy Crouch

Keywords

Perhaps no statistic reminds us more graphically of the distortion of power in our world than this: there are twenty-one million slaves in the world today. They labor as brick makers, coffee harvester...

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Thinking Biblically about Work and Ownership

Author

Ben Witherington III

Keywords

In modern Western culture we place a high value on work, which is fine, but one of the philosophical assumptions that can come with such values is that we assume that we own what we earn or buy. From ...

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Addiction & Idolatry

Author

Andy Crouch

Keywords

In his excellent book on the subject of power (Playing God), author Andy Crouch describes the connection between idolatry and addiction: In modern, secular societies perhaps the clearest example of ...

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Bringing the Human Race to Its Knees

Author

Cormac McCarthy

Keywords

In Cormac McCarthy’s modern classic, No Country for Old Men, sheriff Ed Tom Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones in the Major Motion Picture) pontificates on this rising evil that has infiltrated his until...

current affairs and causes on Modern Life

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