The president spoke at the annual prayer breakfast this week and had some "interesting" things to say about tax policy, New Testament theology, and the role a Christian should play (and pay) in society.

I wrote about the whole thing over at AEI's "Values and Capitalism" blog.  Here's an excerpt:

Most of the verses that sound like the president’s reference have nothing to do with charity and speak to the need a true believer has to be utterly dependent and subservient to the Spirit and Word of God. Matthew 25:29, which reads, “For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance,” is a call to Christians to use their God-given abilities and advantages wisely and productively. This is seen as a non-negotiable aspect of being a disciple of Christ. The reward for such behavior is additional opportunities to serve God “faithfully and fruitfully,” as one commentator puts it.

And here is where “faith and politics” smash right up against one another. As I said before, nearly every American is on-board with the notion that people should pay their taxes. We all (correctly) praise those who give their time and money to those in need. We’re all for helping and fairness and puppy dogs.

The problem, simply put, is this: If another self-proclaimed Christian is using scripture and doctrine to promote things that I know to be detrimental to an economy and society, I can’t support that Christian merely because he brings up “Christian stuff” in convoluted ways. I can pray for that Christian. I can be cordial and kind. If that Christian is willing, I can use the Matthew 18 model of coming to that “brother” in hopes of admonishing and correcting him. But if he persists, if entire swaths of our society persist, then I am duty-bound to oppose the ill-fated plans. Regardless of intentions—something only God can assess anyway—I must apply the advantages I’ve been gifted. In this instance, President Obama unfortunately learned at the feet of people who believe in economic policies that can’t work.

Please read the entire thing right here.

From the movie Patton:

"For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph - a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals from the conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children, robed in white, stood with him in the chariot, or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: That all glory is fleeting."

Very sad to hear about Joe Paterno's passing. He wasn't a bad guy, in my estimation. He was, however, proof that "all glory is fleeting." Decades of doing so many right things at Penn State - of being a great coach, upstanding citizen, and leader of men - can be brought crashing down by a few key poor decisions. It's a lesson we can all learn from (in so many ways).

Being a young man myself, it's hard for me to even ponder what my "legacy" might be one day (hopefully) far into the future.  But the primary lesson I will take away from the saga of Joe Paterno is this:  Worry about doing the right thing in every situation and not about your legacy. The former will take care of the latter.

RIP, JoePa.

A man has made a compelling documentary about the impact Dennis Prager has had on his own intellectual and spiritual journey.  It's called Baseball, Dennis & the French and you can check out the trailer below:

One interesting thing about this entire project to me personally is the fact that the producer/director was led to his Christian faith by the radio show and writings of a Jewish intellectual (Dennis). Just a neat tidbit, in my opinion.

By: R.J. Moeller

------------------------

As most of you already have heard, Christopher Hitchens, the renowned British journalist/atheist/author, died of pneumonia Thursday night at a hospital in Houston, TX.  Mr. Hitchens had been battling cancer of the esophagus for more than a year now.  He went from looking like this:

...to this (and in a relatively short amount of time):

When I heard the news late Thursday night, I was listening to a local radio station while driving home from seeing a very stupid movie (the new Mission Impossible) and instantly my mood went from silly anger about Tom Cruise's sub-par film to true, genuine sadness for the family of Mr. Hitchens.  Chris' brother, Peter, is actually an outspoken Evangelical Christian and talented writer in his own right.  I thought of the numbing pain a Believer must feel when a sibling or parent who does not share their faith passes away.  I thought about the the fact that if the Bible is indeed true, and Christopher did not change his mind about Jesus Christ before succumbing to his illness, then he is in Hell right now.  There is no way around it: this is a tough pill for anyone to swallow.

Christianity is often attacked for supposedly being "callous" with its "fire-and-brimstone" teachings on eternal punishment for those who reject God in this life.  Perhaps some of those charges are true.  Perhaps many are not.  What I do know is this: It is important for all of us to come face-to-face with the implications of the things we say we believe in, and for me, last night, hearing about the death of Christopher Hitchens, was yet another one of those moments.

I honestly never hated "Hitch" (as he was known to his friends).  In fact, I adored his writing style and prose.  He was a complex man and a supremely talented communicator.  His columns were a delight to read and I re-posted some of them on this very site over the past 4 years.  I don't wish to run down his entire biography here and now, so for more on that I would recommend this review of his autobiography Hitch-22 at National Review Online ("His Own Drum") from last year.  The guy had an incredible life and for all intents and purposes, practiced what he preached.  In a strange way, despite his militant atheism and predominantly liberal political views, I respected that fact.

I respect consistency, probably because of how inconsistent I know I am in my daily life.

Hitchens hated religion, hated the idea of a Higher Power, and was unrelenting in his critique of all religious faith.  He wrote a famous book a few years back entitled God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Those are, in my opinion, unnecessarily strong words to describe something more than 95% of all humans who have ever lived have practiced.  Belief in some sort of Higher Power is as natural as breathing.  Even the suffering we see screams of an "evil" that can't adequately be described in humanistic, secular terms.

Religion is not the problem.  Bad values and a distorted worldview are.  Everyone believes in something.  Even atheists like Hitchens do not want anarchy, and if you are to avoid anarchy, people must have something to believe in.  We need a right and wrong.  Atheists look at that and say, "See, it's just an evolutionary defense mechanism that people form religions...it's all about controlling the masses."  Notice that they do not say, "So let's abolish all institutions and live like feral pigs."  They instead say, "I know a better way for people to live and will now work to see it implemented."  Christopher Hitchens had a "moral code" and set of values he lived by, he simply thought it superior to the Judeo-Christian traditions and teachings that have largely defined the Western culture he was a benefactor of.  But he still believed in something.

As Bob Dylan sang, "You gotta' serve somebody."

I'm not saying that Chrisopher Hitchens did not understand this.  I truly think he did.  My real problem with Hitchens' writings on religion (and the writings of those like him through the ages) is not that he hated Christianity, but is the trickle-down secularism it produces in the hearts and minds of others (most notably, young people).  Because so much of the mainstream media and so many members of modern academia agree with his worldview, Hitchens was able to reach millions of impressionable young minds with a biased message that passed itself off as an un-biased - scientific even! - appraisal of the natural world.  Meanwhile, stuffy old Christians are perpetually framed as those "world is flat", out-of-touch, close-minded bigots whose time has passed.  Of course many brilliant defenders of theism (i.e. William Lane Craig, Jay Richards, etc.) have challenged and debated men like Hitchens, but never are those men of faith given the same prominence and respect in the culture at-large as Hitchens, Dawkins, and Sam Harris are.

But I'm not here today to feed you nothing but sour grapes.  As I've already stated, Christopher Hitchens was a phenomenal talent and man of conviction (however wrong those convictions might have been).  He was willing to anger liberals with his support for unpopular positions like the War on Terror and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. He was unafraid of what either side had to say about him. Hitchens was even willing to take on the sacred cow of late-night fake-news programming hosted by the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

He was witty, engaging, and mesmerizing when you got the chance to see him interviewed on TV or YouTube clips.

I recommend this one to you:

In closing: I'm sorry he's gone.  My thoughts and prayers are with his family.  My deepest hope is that he called out to his Maker before the end.

You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls.

But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.

Staffers from the American Enterprise Institute - as well as AEI's president, Arthur C. Brooks - were featured on the PBS News Hour this week.  For those of you who don't know, I write and host a podcast for AEI and their "Values and Capitalism" project.

The topic of the segment on PBS was "Happiness and Inequality" and the network's correspondent filed a report about the significant gap between liberals and conservatives when it comes to their levels of personal happiness and contentment.

I'm proud to be associated with AEI, and proud to be a conservative.

I came across this interesting piece at National Review Online and thought it more than worth sharing.  Basically, it is a recounting of what it took to get A Charlie Brown Christmas on the air.  There was plenty of controversy in 1965 surrounding the decision to broadcast something so blatantly Christian (with a passage from Luke read aloud by one of the characters, no less).

An excerpt:

Few headlines about network television make me giddy. Fewer still make me hopeful that all is good in the world. But back in August of 2010, I read the following headline from the media pages with great excitement: “Charlie Brown Is Here to Stay: ABC Picks Up ‘Peanuts’ Specials Through 2015.” The first of these to be made, the famous Christmas special, was an instant classic when it was created by Charles Schulz on a shoestring budget back in 1965, and thanks to some smart television executives, it will be around for at least another five years for all of us to see and enjoy.

What people don’t know is that the Christmas special almost didn’t happen, because some not-so-smart television executives almost didn’t let it air. You see, Charles Schulz had some ideas that challenged the way of thinking of those executives 46 years ago, and one of them had to do with the inclusion in his Christmas cartoon of a reading from the King James Bible’s version of the Gospel of Luke.

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

As far back as 1965 — just a few years before Time magazine asked “Is God Dead?” — CBS executives thought a Bible reading might turn off a nation populated with Christians. And during a Christmas special, no less! Ah, the perils of living on an island in the northeast called Manhattan.

And here is the portion of the Charlie Brown special that was so controversial:

When you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. We can not only vote in elections at the ballot box, but we can vote with our dollars, our TV-viewing decisions, and with an email or two to networks and their sponsors. There are some battles worth fighting, and defending the Christ in Christmas is perhaps one of them.

A few summers back I was an intern for World Magazine and Dr. Marvin Olasky in Manhattan for three months.  One of the other interns working there at the same time was Alisa Harris.  Ms. Harris has written a book called Raised Right: How I Untangled My Faith From Politics.

I've yet to read the thing, but a new friend I met at The Acton Institute's summer conference back in June, Andrew Walker, has written a wonderful review of the book over at TheGospelCoalition.org and I highly recommend you check it out!

An excerpt:

Harris gets a lot right in her book—namely, that “something is deeply wrong with the evangelical politics in which our childhood were immersed” (8). Her volume reminds us that however we vote, we must be vigilant and chastened in how we arrive at the decision. Truly, no party in American politics is the Christian party, for no party up to this point in time has adopted (nor should they) any particular religious creed into its platform. Her book offers both an important reminder in how Christians often wrongly use their rhetoric to support their positions and also a strong rebuke to the “politically obsessed.” She approvingly quotes Peggy Noonan, who warns, “Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their nature; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.” A wise warning, indeed.

What the reader will notice, however, is that Harris’s call for love, justice, and a truce in the culture wars results in the now predictable angst-ridden liberalism. She may wish to escape such labels, but her voting record and newfound political principles reveal it. This story has been told before. Whether it be Donald Miller’s youthful protest, Anne Lamott’s introspective self-doubt, or Jim Wallis’s liberalism, Harris’s volume is but another in a long litany of what Marvin Olasky calls “self-hating evangelical” manifestos.

Give the full review a tumble, folks!

It's so easy for people of my generation to forget that, up until 1991, Russian Communism was a reality in the world.

A dominating, all-encompassing  reality.

The Cold War wasn't just some foot-note of history that your public school history teacher glosses over to squeeze in yet another unit on how we mistreated Native Americans.  This summer I've been reading through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, considered to be one of the most important works of the 20th century.

It is the non-fiction account of what exactly it was like to live under the totalitarian USSR regime, but the thing reads like a Dostoevsky novel.  It reads like 1984 or Brave New World, only worse, because it is real.  People actually treated other humans this way.  And not in some age long past: it was within my own lifetime.

It still continues in various forms today around the planet.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, "People need to be reminded much more often than instructed."  We all know communism is a bad thing.  But just how bad was it?  What ideas and values and historical events led the people of Russia to such a wretched place?  What can we learn from their mistakes and the sacrifice of millions who were murdered under Soviet rule?

Yuri Yarim-Agaev was a Russian scientist and political dissident in the 1970's.  Recently he sat down with my favorite interviewer (Peter Robinson, host of Uncommon Knowledge) and had much to say about what happened "over there" and what we can do to ensure it never happens over here.

This was only Part 1 of the interview. Watch the full conversation between Robinson and Yarim-Agaev right here.

Two of the speakers at The Discovery Institute conference I went to were Wesley J. Smith and Jay Richards.  Watch these video clips of each respective thinker and tell me what they have to say doesn't need to be heard by Christians across the country.

First, Wesley J. Smith discussing his book A Rat Is A Pig Is A Dog Is A Boy:

And then there is this presentation Dr. Richards gave at The Cato Institute, articulating the thinking behind his best-selling book, Money, Greed, and God:

Pass these clips along to your friends and family. If you don't, they won't be heard.  Not on secular campuses.  Not on most Christian campuses.

Despite my enormous, Chestertonian stature, I was never a bully.  Well, I take that back.  A few times I used my size to intimidate kids who were picking on smaller kids, so call that whatever you will.

Now, don't get me wrong, I have more than enough flaws to highlight, but picking on "losers" and "nerds" was never one of them.  The only reason I bring this up is because of the recent "bullying" hysteria that seems to be sweeping the nation.  I don't know what it is like to be bullied, and I don't know what it's like to bully someone.

I believe that it happens, and I'm not trying to make light of students who have felt physically intimated or who have been emotionally terrorized by some obnoxious boy or girl at their school.   However, we may have crossed a ridiculous line this week with news from (gasp!) California that a new bill has been signed into law that allows public schools to punish (and in some cases, expel) students for "cyberbullying" that takes place away from the school's campus.

What better way to highlight the madness of an issue than to "Google search" the topic in question.  Here are a few of the gems I tracked down among the myriad of Google images one finds when they type "cyberbullying" into the search engine of choice these days.

Let's start things off with a classic, McGee and Me-like cartoon depiction of what our collective response to bullying in general needs to be:

I think the message has been conveyed.  We don't want 40 year old men with pony tails harassing harmless-looking junior highers who probably made the mistake of waking up their bizarre, older, unemployed neighbor from the "beer nap" he had been enjoying on a lawn chair in the front yard.

Moving up the ladder of bullying to the kind that takes place in conjunction with cell phone usage, we have this dandy:

To my eye, what we have here is an undercover police officer busting some high school punk who wanted to buy weed, and the young punk's friend couldn't resist snapping a photo of the encounter in hopes of scoring a sweet Facebook profile pic.  If this is a bullying situation, again, why are fully grown men stealing lunch money from 15 year old kids in back allies?  And I'm fairly certain that we already have laws on the books against dudes attacking minors in allies.

Continuing on our journey toward cyberbullying nirvana, we arrive at the space set aside for harassing emails one might receive from a mean-spirited peer.

Might this girl simply have received an electronic mail informing her that another girl already likes the boy she had feelings for?  Does it really have to be bullying we are witnesses to?

Or how about this glum chap:

Now, it is more likely that this young man is watching a sad episode of LOST or 24 than it is that he is reading a harassing electronic correspondence with a fellow classmate.

And these cute little kindergartners simply cannot have made enough enemies to warrant emotionally-crippling emails from a peer:

Look at them!  They're sort of giggling.  I refuse to believe they are being bullied!

But now we do come to some more questionable pics that may in fact depict cyberbullying.  There is this:

And this:

Alright, I concede that these photos are much more incriminating (and potentially hurtful).  All I will say is that if I complained every time "people" (aka friends, family members, and loved ones) left me notes like these on my computer screen, I'd have to quit my day job to cite them all.  And plus, these menacing messages may have been part of an elaborate practical joke.  Or meant to inspire these girls to greatness, like when Rocky's trainer (Mick) told him he was rubbish as a boxer (but really Mick thought Rock was a good boxer).

Last, and certainly not least, we have snapshots of cyberbullying in which the subject is so unliked, his or her own computer lashes out at them:

And this:

If you are harassed and bullied by your PC, stop taking LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs.

I close things out with this, something I try and live my life by (and so should you).

Best way to ensure your kids won't be cyberbullied?  Don't let them use the internet so much.

Didn't even need a law to tell me that!