Contrary to Jonathan Frank’s opinion article, the Moral Majority and Vote Common Good are not the same at all.
President Obama, Memorial Day and Hiroshima
Certainly I want to be sympathetic toward those who lost loved ones while in military service. And, yes, I want to be sympathetic toward those whose loved ones died while in military service for other countries.
What about political correctness?
In his first inaugural address in March 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Nevertheless, responding to the widespread fear expressed by people across the nation, on February 19, 1942,…
What does “Jesus Is Lord” mean?
Earlier this month I wrote about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his highly influential book The Cost of Discipleship, published in a new translation in 2001 as justDiscipleship. Bonhoeffer’s emphasis was upon following Jesus as Lord. But what does that mean?
What about Evangeliphobia?
At the Vital Conversations meeting that I mentioned in my previous blog article, one of the participants asked if anyone had read the novel Christian Nation. No one had been reading it for the last several days. It is an…
Unarmed truth and unconditional love
The year 1964 was a difficult one for the United States. The nation had suffered the assassination of a beloved President in November of the year before. The war in Vietnam was heating up in 1964: the Gulf of Tonkin…
A second Bill of Rights
Three years later, on January 11, 1944, FDR gave his 11th (!) State of the Union talk. He had just recently come back from an overseas trip during which he had conferred with British Prime Minister Churchill in Cairo and…
Fighting for the four freedoms
It is has been called the best State of the Union address of all time. That was President Roosevelt’s speech seventy-five years ago, on January 6, 1941. It is the one popularly known as the Four Freedoms address.
Clothes for the new year
Yesterday I had the privilege of preaching at St. Luke’s United Church of Christ in Independence, Mo., less than a 15-minute walk from the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum. St. Luke’s was founded in 1878 as the German Evangelical…