Straightsplainshaming: rebuking, ridiculing, or dismissing a straight person for speaking on issues of sexuality, just because they are straight. Whitesplainshaming: rebuking, ridiculing, or dismissing a white person for speaking on issues of race, just because they are white. Mansplainshaming: rebuking, ridiculing, or dismissing a man for speaking on issues of gender, just because he is […]
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Review: Beyond Racial Gridlock by George Yancey
“Gridlock” is a good word to describe the state of evangelical discussions on race today. The past couple years especially have witnessed a meteoric rise in the use (and misuse) of terms like “critical race theory” and “systemic racism.” If evangelicals are going to break through the current ideological impasse, then they need a reliable […]
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Review: The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone
This summer I’ve been trying to read as much as I can on the topic of racial justice, covering a range of perspectives—both secular and Christian, and both progressive and conservative. One title that I just finished is The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone, who is considered to be the father […]
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Review: Them Before Us by Katy Faust and Stacy Manning
Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children’s Rights Movement, by Katy Faust and Stacy Manning. Post Hill Press, 2021. 235 pages. I first heard about this book from a recommendation by John Stonestreet on the Colson Center’s Breakpoint Podcast. When I learned that Robert George (see my reviews here and here) wrote the […]
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Four Christian Responses to Gay Marriage
This blog post is probably at least twenty years too late, if not much more so. Christians in America lost the gay marriage debate long before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision. When the best response we can give to why the government shouldn’t legally recognize same-sex marriage is “because the Bible says it’s […]
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Discussing abortion, Scholastic-style
In the spirit of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, what follows is an attempt to tackle the topic of abortion according to a medieval-scholastic disputation. The topic is divided into four key questions (philosophical, biblical, circumstantial, and legal) that follow the format of Aquinas’s Summa, first setting forth the objections, then stating the opposing traditional view […]
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How prepared are you to answer pro-choice objections against the pro-life case?
I recently finished reading The Case for Life by Scott Klusendorf (Crossway, 2009), which presents a compelling case for the personhood of human beings from the moment of fertilization. It also made me realize just how underequipped I was to respond to so many common pro-choice objections. What I’ve done here is gather the objections […]
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What was Adam’s reward? A summary/commentary of Francis Turretin
One of the ongoing intramural Reformed debates centers on what would have happened to Adam if he hadn’t fallen into sin. Would he have continued in an earthly paradise? Or would he have been elevated to a higher, heavenly stage? Would his obedience have counted as “merit”? Does that make Eden a kind of temporary […]
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Legislating Morality? A Review of Making Men Moral by Robert P. George
The idea of “legislating morality” is pretty unpopular these days. It grates against a widely shared assumption that people have a right to do whatever they want, as long as they don’t harm anyone else. The idea may also raise alarms about the danger of government overreach, perhaps even evoking images of a dystopian, totalitarian […]
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What Is Marriage? A Summary of a Secular Defense of Man and Woman
Sometimes the most obvious things in life are the hardest to define. For example, how does one define beauty? Or manhood? Or marriage? Traditionally, such features of human existence were taken for granted as objective and self-evident, requiring no defense. But things have changed. The obvious is no longer obvious. It’s not quite right to […]
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July 19, 2021 
