LEGATO...

It was an evening of open discussions on Facebook like any other. But something unfortunate happened that night. A former student of mine, a young black woman, unfriended me. Why? I wrote to her that, as a Christian, her value and identity were found in Christ, not in her racial identity, and that that same truth applied to me as a white male. She wrote back that my words “hurt.” She went on to say that my brand of hate would not be tolerated on her timeline and that she would pray for my “ignorance.” Where racial discrimination exists, it is wrong. Its existence is one reason I have labored to plant two colleges, one in Kenya, the other in Congo (DRC). I love my African brothers and sisters, as well as my students of color in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world. Given the sadness I felt over the Facebook incident, I’m concerned that cultural norms are a bad remedy for healing wounds caused by racism. So, I feel compelled to ask a question. Are secular values the real answ...

In its opening Preamble, the Nashville Statement : a Coalition on Human Sexuality, makes an important point on human gender. It reads Many deny that God created human beings for his glory, and that his good purposes for us include our personal and physical design as male and female. It is common to think that human identity as male and female is not part of God’s beautiful plan, but is, rather, an expression of an individual’s autonomous preferences. The pathway to full and lasting joy through God’s good design for his creatures is thus replaced by the path of shortsighted alternatives that, sooner or later, ruin human life and dishonor God The Statement remarks on “male and female” largely due to the assault on what is called Cisgender (Cis), a term for people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth. According to advocates for the transgender lifestyle, sex and gender have nothing to do with one another. But is that true? The a...

In 1961, the Supreme Court ruled in Torcaso v. Watkins that Roy Torcaso need not undergo a religious test for a position as a notary public. The effect was to eliminate all religious tests for public office within the United States. Even mere profession of belief in God was struck down as a prerequisite for state employment. Torcaso  eclipsed the Religious Test Clause of Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which states that no one shall be required to adhere to any religion or religious doctrine to hold office at the federal level. While both religious and non-religious peoples might agree that the decision in Torcaso was a correct one, now the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme, whereby America is faced with a new and pernicious problem. The principle problem with America is that we no longer know what we believe as a people . Because most Americans now reject any absolute standard of truth, our nation is unable to discern right from wrong in the face of cr...