Emmanuel Evangelical Church Chippenham

Statistics indicate that a growing number of Americans are marrying someone from outside their own religious commitments. Is this a trend we should encourage? Not if you are committed to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The statistical trend is clear enough, but the question is more complex than may first appear. The Washington Post reported on June 6, 2010 that 25 percent of American households were mixed-faith in 2006, according to the General Social Survey. That represents a significant increase from the 15 percent of such households in 1988.

But, what does mixed-faith mean? It could mean the mixing of relatively similar Christian denominations, or it might mean the mixing of two very different systems of belief.

As Naomi Schaefer Riley reported, “In a paper published in 1993, Evelyn Lehrer, a professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found that if members of two mainline Christian denominations marry, they have a one in five chance of being divorced in five years. A Catholic and a member of an evangelical denomination have a one in three chance. And a Jew and a Christian who marry have a greater than 40 percent chance of being divorced in five years.” Keep Reading

From time to time, a column in a newspaper is more revealing than its author probably intended it to be. That seems to be the case with “Myths Widen the Science-Religion Divide” by Elaine Howard Ecklund, published in the July 19, 2010 edition of USA Today. In her essay, Professor Ecklund suggests that science and religion can enter into a constructive dialogue. But a closer look at her essay reveals that this dialogue, at least as it involves most Christians, is a one-way street. Keep Reading

Beauty, says philosopher Roger Scruton, “is never viewed with indifference.” Those words come to mind in light of a major article in this week’s Newsweek magazine that purports to document the fact that employers show a marked preference for attractive people in making hiring decisions. Add to that article a recent news report on a new sperm bank dedicated to the reproduction of “beautiful people.”

The Newsweek article, written by Jessica Bennett, begins by documenting what economists measure as the financial benefits of physical attractiveness. The “beauty premium” adds 5 percent to the lifetime earnings of attractive men, and 4 percent to the lifetime earnings of women. Economist Daniel Hamermesh argues that an attractive man earns an average of $250,000 of “beauty premium” income over his “least-attractive counterpart.” Keep Reading

The tragedy of abortion remains one of this nation’s greatest reasons for shame, and the fact that over a million abortions are performed each year is nothing less than horrifying. In light of this tragedy, it is at least encouraging to know that abortion, though an industry of death, is not a growth industry. At least for now.

All that may change if a new movement meets with success. As reported by Emily Bazelon, a new movement seeks to move abortions from abortion clinics to your local hospital, medical school, and physician’s office. In other words, those behind this new movement intend to mainstream abortion as medical practice, and to hide it behind a facade of medical respectability.

Bazelon’s report, “The New Abortion Providers,” appears as the cover story in the July 18, 2010 edition of The New York Times Magazine. As she reports, this new movement is training family physicians and other doctors to perform abortion as a standard part of their medical practice. As the cover of the magazine states, “They are doctors seeing patients in their offices. They have quietly learned how to terminate pregnancies.” Keep Reading

Anne Eggebroten visited Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, and what she found there shocked her. As a matter of fact, she was so shocked that she wrote about that experience in the July 2010 edition of Sojourners magazine. Readers of her article are likely to experience a shock of their own — they will be shocked that Eggebroten could actually have been surprised by what she found there.

In “The Persistence of Patriarchy,” Eggebroten writes about “the wide reach” of complementarian views of manhood and womanhood among conservative Christians. Her article is subtitled: “Hard to believe, but some churches are still teaching about male headship.” Hard to believe?

Can anyone really be surprised that this is so? In some sense, it might be surprising to the generally liberal readership of Sojourners, but it can hardly be surprising to anyone with the slightest attachment to evangelical Christianity. Nevertheless, Anne Eggebroten’s article represents what I call a “National Geographic moment” — an example of someone discovering the obvious and thinking it exotic and strange. It is like a reporter returning from travel to far country to explain the strange tribe of people she found there — evangelical Christians believing what the Christian church has for 2,000 years believed the Bible to teach and require. So . . . what is so exotic? Keep Reading

While all eyes were on California, where a very high-profile case about same-sex marriage is moving to a judge’s ruling, a federal judge in Massachusetts handed down rulings in a pair of cases that struck at the heart of the Defense of Marriage Act [DOMA], which passed into law in 1996. As the rulings stand now, DOMA is both challenged and weakened, and momentum for the judicial legalization of same-sex marriage grows. Keep Reading

For those interested in the fate of our culture, New York Magazine is an indispensable barometer. This single magazine, perhaps more than any other periodical, offers feature articles that catch the cultural conversation. Granted, that cultural conversation is largely Manhattan-centric and geared to the highly educated and economically secure classes. But, since those are the very people who tend to direct the cultural conversation, what interests them will almost surely soon interest the rest of the nation.

This week, the issue is children and happiness. Not the happiness of children, but the debate over whether having children makes for parental happiness. Looking first to the sociological and psychological data, the picture looks bleak. According to the current scholarly consensus, parents are more likely to be depressed than non-parents, and parents report themselves as less happy as well. Keep Reading

Last Friday marked the final live broadcast of The Albert Mohler Program. Delivering that program was one of the great privileges of my life, and one for which I will always be thankful. Day by day, coast to coast, individuals and families welcomed me into their lives and joined in what we sincerely hoped was “Intelligent Christian Conversation About the Issues That Matter.” For years, I eagerly awaited the experience of sitting behind that microphone and talking to America and friends around the world. Keep Reading