Articles - Miscellanea

Today, a battle is being waged in our culture. Christian theism (belief in the God of the Bible) is under the most severe attack that most of us have ever seen during the time that we have lived on Earth...

On June 7, 2011, Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple, Inc., the American multinational technology company, made his last public appearance. Jobs died from cancer later in 2011. His last public appearance was before the city council of Cupertino, CA, for the purpose of announcing Apple’s plan to build a 2.8 million square foot office building located on a 175 acre property, the former campus of Hewlett-Packard’s advanced products division. This high tech office development will be surrounded by 7,000 trees, including apricot, plum, olive, and apple orchards, and indigenous plants—a landscape of beauty designed by a leading Stanford University arborist...

In a 2015 book, How the West Really Lost God, cultural critic Mary Eberstadt affirms that religion is like language—it is learned through community and the first community is the family. Rod Dreher, author of a more recent book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, agrees with Eberstadt’s conclusion. He says, “When both the family and the community become fragmented and fail, the transmission of religion to the next generation becomes far more difficult” (123).

In one of Francis Bacon’s Essays, he wrote of truth. His opening lines are, “What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.” It is a classic illustration of the observation that men stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.

According to Oxford dictionaries, “Truth is dead. Facts are passé.” This is the opening line of Amy Wang, Washington Post writer, in her article titled “‘Post-Truth’ Named 2016 Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries.” Wang says the folks at Oxford say post-truth denotes “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential . . . than appeals to emotion . . . [creating] an atmosphere in which [truth] is irrelevant.”

I remember my undergraduate years at Harding College when Dr. Clifton Ganus, Jr. was president. Dr. Ganus is a remarkable Christian gentleman. He is among the greatest administrators I have known in Christian higher education. He is also an expert historian. Ganus and Arnold Toynbee, the late prominent British historian, were friends. I recall a chapel speech Dr. Ganus delivered in which he shared part of a conversation he had with Toynbee. The latter said, “Dr. Ganus, civilizations fall when men start hurting one another.”

His mother was Madalyn Murray O’Hair. She won the landmark lawsuit filed on his behalf when he was fourteen years old, effectively banning prayer and Bible reading from public schools in America by an 8-1 Supreme Court decision, June 17, 1963. America’s schools have never recovered from this decision that long-time U. S. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia described as somebody “tampering with America’s soul.”

Minnie Louise Haskins (1875-1957) was a British writer, missions worker, London School of Economics student and teacher, and industrial welfare leader in the first half of the 20th century. In addition to her literary work as a poet and novelist, Haskins and Eleanor T. Kelly co-authoredFoundations of Industrial Welfare, a significant publication promoting a spirit of cooperation between worker and employer. However, it is a small collection of poetry published in 1908 that contains the obscure poem for which Minnie Haskins is best remembered. Originally published under the title “God Knows,” this poem is best known from its popular title “The Gate of the Year.”