current affairs and causes on Societal Norms

One of my favorite Bible illustrations of someone willing to go against the norms of society to befriend another based on love and forgiveness is found in the New Testament book of Philemon. It is a m...

The distinction between drugs that are considered legal or illegal in a given society is often based on much more than just scientific information. Traditions, economics, religion, and the popular med...

So it is that in most Western industrialized countries church and society have lost their identity, religion has become more and more a private affair, and morality has become secular. This process af...

There is no social evil, no form of injustice whether of the feudal or the capitalist order which has not been sanctified in some way or other by religious sentiment and thereby rendered more impervio...

Because power corrupts, society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.

“Moral”…is an orientation toward understandings about what is right and wrong, just and unjust, that are not established by our own actual desires or preferences but instead are believed to exist apar...

Not very long ago, “culture” commonly referred to what is now meant by “high culture.” For instance, we might have said, “She has such a cultured voice.” If a person read Shakespeare, Goethe, Gore Vid...

The Seven Social Sins are: Wealth without work. Pleasure without conscience. Knowledge without character. Commerce without morality. Science without humanity. Worship without sacrifice. Politics witho...

What makes an anxious society? We want to be different and stand out as unique without the presence of Jesus setting us apart.

Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

Human life in the western world today... is characterized by an enormously wide range of incompatible truth claims pertaining to human values, aspirations, norms, morality, and meaning— A hyperplurali...

If we’re unable or unwilling to discern a norm to judge what is good and evil, the whole moral order will tumble into confusion. If we don’t get the moral facts straight, a variety of “crises” will co...

As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come wi...

God built into the creation a variety of cultural spheres, such as the family, economics, politics, art, and intellectual inquiry. Each of these spheres has its own proper "business" and nee...

[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...

Civilization is always in danger when those who have never learned to obey are given the right to command.

You can never have an impact on society if you have not changed yourself.

We are taught, often by the tone of voice of the media and the politicians rather than by explicit argument, to bow down before…progress. It is unstoppable. Who wants to be left behind, to be behind t...

The lower classes of society are “not only disproportionately vulnerable to injustice, but usually disproportionately actual victims of injustice. Injustice is not equally distributed. One has to deci...

Obviously there’s a lot of good things about societal and technological progress, and in a lot of ways our lives are much easier than, say, our grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ lives. But there’s ...

We are a society that despises lack. We despise weakness and need and insufficiency. We turn the other way and pretend to be watching oncoming traffic when the red light halts us and the beggar reache...

Like-minded, homogeneous groups squelch dissent, grow more extreme in their thinking, and ignore evidence that their positions are wrong. As a result, we now live in a giant feedback loop, hearing our...

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...

Thus, cases of injustice, and oppression, and tyranny, and the most extravagant bigotry, are in constant occurrence among us every day. It is the custom to trumpet forth much wonder and astonishment a...

The majority culture (which for a little while longer is still white) has the luxury of being oblivious to race (which would change in an instant, if we moved to Nigeria). But for minority peoples, ra...

For biblical righteousness is more than a private and personal affair; it includes social righteousness as well. And social righteousness, as we learn from the law and the prophets, is concerned with ...

Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone's lifestyle, you must fear them or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everyth...

The first phrase, “be fruitful and multiply,” means to develop the social world: build families, churches, schools, cities, governments, laws. The second phrase, “subdue the earth,” means to harness t...

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 ...

The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.