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The World We Made: Coming soon...

UPDATE: There’s been lots of interest in this podcast, with about 2000 listens from 30 countries and counting! If you haven’t subscribed yet, we’ve added a few links to make it easier for those of you who aren’t on iTunes, which is most of you. (Welcome non-Apple fanboys.) Don't miss an episode. Scroll down and subscribe now.

"These are the confessions of American Christians recovering from American Christianity. This is the world we made."

Warhorn Media is pleased to announce a new podcast hosted by Jake Mentzel and Nathan Alberson and featuring Tim Bayly. The World We Made is designed to help ordinary American Christians think through the difficult issues we face in our culture today. Season 1 is about homosexuality.

Over the course of the first season, we talk with Tim about how we went from having anti-sodomy laws in all 50 states (just 50 years ago) to where we are today. What are the changes Tim has seen in his lifetime? What exactly do they mean? What part did the culture play and what part did the church play? How are regular Bible-believing Christians supposed to respond? What has Tim learned as a pastor to help equip us for the challenge of ministering to men and women tempted by homosexuality?

These are the questions we'll be unpacking over the course of eight 20-minute episodes. We'll start out slow and easy, and things will pick up steam as we get closer and closer to the end. You won't want to miss it, so check out the trailer (above), and go ahead and subscribe now in iTunes or Android (or wherever you listen to your podcasts—Google Play Music, Stitcher, TuneInRSS feed) so you're ready when the first episode drops (July 17). 

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Audio recordings from Shepherds Conference now available...

not_ashamed_0.pngThis past February, Clearnote Church, Bloomington hosted our annual Shepherds Conference. This year our subject was "Not Ashamed: Ministry in a Post-Obergefell World." The entire world is talking about the beauty of this and that sexual perversion, so the pressures on Christians to join in the work of removing these sins' shame is intense. Will the church be ashamed of the shame God has attached to these sins, turning away from His words to join the gay pride parade?

So we had an idea: why not hold a conference that might be helpful to the saints in this evil day?

Click here to listen to the audio recordings. We pray that they will be strengthening to you.


The homosexualists' Chinese water torture...

Drip, drip, drip. The top right of the Google News page right now has this headline: 

Fans Give Back to Beloved Pittsburgh Artist and Dying Partner

The news story is about two sodomites who have been crowd-sourced $17,000 to have their dream vacation before...


Pining for Christendom...

NYT's David Brooks is so very precious about buggery. My friend Mark Albrecht forwarded a link to Brooks's latest piece dissing Rod Dreher's exquisitely titled "The Benedict Option" while flattering Dreher for writing the most important book on religion in ten years. He points out twice in his three-minute read that he disagrees with Dreher's opposition to buggery.

Noted.

Noted again.

Dreher thinks the inspiration for his book's title is the sixth century founder of the Benedictine monastic order who wrote...


Alfred C. Kinsey: an introduction...

Alfred_Charles_Kinsey.jpgThe work of Alfred Charles Kinsey at Indiana University, and the affiliated Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, has had a dramatic impact on our age.

In that I grew up in Bloomington, the home of IU and the Kinsey Institute, and have lived here for a portion of my adult life, I can claim some expertise in knowing the reputation of the Institute in our small, midwestern city. In that I’m a Christian, I’ll be writing from a specifically Christian worldview in making these series of posts. The impact of the man and the Institute that bears his name has been evil. 

The author of my major source has made an attempt to be objective and at least some reviewers think he has been successful. It is the biography by James H. Jones entitled, Alfred C. Kinsey: a public/private life (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997). Jones is a historian who teaches at the University of Houston. He did his Ph.D. at IU and has written, Bad Blood: the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. He began his work on Kinsey while he was in Bloomington...


Media bullies, pagan and Christian...

Bloomberg reports:

The incoming Trump administration is considering moving White House press briefings out of the West Wing to accommodate more than the “Washington media elite,” President-elect Donald Trump’s press secretary said.

“This is about greater accessibility, more people in the process,” Sean Spicer said Sunday on Fox News Channel’s “Media Buzz.” Involving more people, including bloggers and others who aren’t from the mainstream media, “should be seen as a welcome change,” he said.

Bravo! I'm so tired of listening to mainstream media—including mainstream Christian media such as "World," "Gospel Coalition," "Desiring God," and "Christianity Today"—whine about blogs. I've seen these guys from the inside, working with and against them on national stories where I am in a position to know how and why they censor voices they don't like while promoting other voices that give them money.

Truth be told, "World" and "Christianity Today" need competition just as much as the "New York Times," the "Chicago Tribune," and Fox News.

After Trump's press conference this past week, I listened as Fox News's talking heads lamented having to keep tack of...

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What to do when Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump is your president...

The sons of Israel lived among the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; and they took their daughters for themselves as wives, and gave their own daughters to their sons, and served their gods. The sons of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, and forgot the LORD their God and served the Baals and the Asheroth.

Then the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, so that He sold them into the hands of Cushan-rishathaim king of Mesopotamia; and the sons of Israel served Cushan-rishathaim eight years. When the sons of Israel cried to the LORD, the LORD raised up a deliverer for the sons of Israel to deliver them, Othniel the son of Kenaz, Caleb’s younger brother. (Judges 3:5-9)

Under the post "Wayne Grudem's ethical casuistry," Mr. Alex Guggenheim commented: "You are going to get either Trump or Clinton. It's time to grow up and take responsibility for delivering one or the other to us."

Here's my response:

Dear Mr. Guggenheim,

You're avoiding the long game. I understand why you're doing so, but don't accuse those who think about history and judgement or blessing in more than four-year increments of being immature and irresponsible. I would say it's precisely the opposite—that those incapable of thinking and choosing anything other than short-term goods are the ones who are immature and irresponsible. Contrary to what all Donald Trump's supporters are telling the church right now, this election cycle...


Hormones, plastic surgery, and transplants...

During the past couple of weeks, I've seen two news items showing our nation's sexual debauchery is about to reach even greater depths. The first was a report on the progress being mode on womb transplants. The second was an announcement earlier today that Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital has performed the nation's first penis transplant.

While I'm thankful this transplant will help a cancer patient, we'd all be fools to think...


President Obama crashes the ladies room...

Giving a news conference in London this past Friday, President Obama told Londoners he opposes North Carolina's law forbidding men who dress up as women from using women's bathrooms. President Obama said laws protecting women from being harassed by men in our nation's restrooms "are wrong and should be overturned." 

President Carter scheduled the White House tennis courts. President Obama supervises our nation’s bathrooms. You can sort of excuse President Carter because he loved to play tennis, but what is President Obama’s excuse for spending his time on bathrooms? 

The whole world’s watching. Listen to the soldiers of ISIS talking about it. They can’t figure out why Americans send their women over to fight men in Afghanistan while here at home men fight to use the women’s bathroom...


Sympathy for the Trumpster-divers...

The soulless creatures who have been the enforcers of the closing of the American mind for decades, now, all contracted the plague during their mandatory four-year service to the Academy we euphemistically refer to as "getting the college degree." If someone escapes the Academy with their thinking still free and their speaking truthful, the media can be trusted to finish the Academy's work.

When NPR needs someone to comment on the darkness of darkness above the Arctic Circle, it has to be a PhD. But when NPR needs someone to comment on the higher suicide rate among single men who are childless, it has to be a PhD then, too.

Even when NPR needs someone to explain why the Stupid Class is coming out in droves for Donald Trump, they'll get a PhD to do the explaining.

No kidding: even if NPR needs someone to explain...


Pat Conroy, 1945 - 2016...

I thought I wrote The Great Santini because I hated my father, and I realized later that I wrote it because I needed to love him. I needed a father to love.  - Pat Conroy

Yesterday, 70-year-old South Carolina novelist, Pat Conroy, died. Conroy's most famous work was his autobiographical novel, The Great Santini, in which he sustains the spewing of venom against his monstrous father from first page to last. My response to the portrayal of the father by his son was visceral. It was like watching a Praying Mantis mate. There was absolutely no love lost and I don't think I finished the book.

If you haven't read The Great Santini, do yourself a favor. Don't. Just imagine hundreds of pages of abuse of his wife and children by the most wicked Marine Corps officer you could imagine as recorded by a son who has sworn vengeance against his father from the day of his birth. Son Conroy carries his vengeance out with a vitriol you can't imagine even Truman Capote pulling off. You have the picture...

As the years passed, Son Conroy made something of a peace with his father, God be praised. He talks about it here in a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross...


Star Wars: "Rey is a woman who refuses to be defined as one."

NOTE: Son Taylor says I'm all wrong about this, and maybe I am. Read The Atlantic article (linked below in the original text of this post) and decide for yourself if they're right as they're wrong, if you know what I mean? Regardless, what a contrast this is to the Blessed Virgin Mary about whom I'm preaching this morning. So this additional material from The Atlantic:

And Rey proves herself to be, in extremely short order, extremely adept as a fighter. She is brave. She is smart. She is resourceful. She is a pilot of Soloian skill. She has a ninja-like command of a bow staff.

The plot of The Force Awakens, in fact, revolves around—relies on—Rey’s martial abilities. It also gently mocks the characters who would doubt those abilities. Finn, in particular, repeatedly attempts to inject chivalry into situations where chivalry is drastically out of place. During a fight the pair has against the First Order troopers, he runs over to Rey in an attempt to rescue her—only to realize that her attackers have already been neatly dispatched with. When Finn grabs her hand as they flee, she snaps, “I know how to run without you holding my hand.” (A few moments later: “Stop taking my hand!”) When Finn asks her, after another battle with intergalactic baddies, “Are you okay?” she shoots him a why-wouldn’t-I-be look. She replies, simply, “Yeah.”

They’re good jokes, but also loaded ones. Rey, after all, has been surviving all this time not just without her family—they left Jakku years ago, and she’s waiting for them to return—but also without, for the most part, a society. And extreme self-sufficiency has a way of putting social conventions into relief. The broader joke embedded in all these small ones is that all the stuff that makes for chivalry (and inequalities, and patriarchy, and if you stretch things only a teeny bit, maybe even gender itself) is itself extremely contingent. It would never occur to Rey that she would be in need of chivalry’s attentions. She has neither the luxury nor the burden of being a damsel in distress; she’s too busy surviving. She fights alongside men and women and droids, superficial matters of identity—clothing, appearance, even gender—all subsumed under bigger questions that come down to, basically: “Can you fight?”

Now, back to my original post:

Mary Lee and I went to see the first Star Wars movie back during our first year of marriage. It was OK, but nothing special.

(Snark removed.)

Still there's no arguing with success. The latest cleared $100,000,000 the first night. That plus they've updated their sexuality to fit our times, which of course means the latest product exchanges God's gift of heterosexuality for man's wickedness of homosexuality...


I don't want it...

Desiring God just posted an article about Holly Holm. She is the woman who beat up Ronda Rousey on Saturday night during an Ultimate Fighting Championship match and sent Rousey to the hospital. One might think that, given what the Scriptures teach and Desiring God's commitment to the Biblical view of women, that this article would be decrying the fact that Americans get their jollies by two women beating each other into a bloody pulp in the ring. But no. Instead this article praises Holly Holm for her humility and selflessness. 

The article cites Proverbs 16:18, "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." Ronda Rousey was the arrogant, loud-mouthed, braggart, while Holm is the humble woman who overcame all odds. The author ends his article by comparing Holm to Jesus...


We have treasure to impart...

For God, who said, “Light shall shine out of darkness,” is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves...  - 2Corinthians 4:6, 7

Since the onslaught of multiculturalism, the humanities have been in a death spiral. What are the humanities? They are the disciplines that focus on human culture, including languages, philosophy, religion, music, theatre, history, law, and literature.

Last month in the New Criterion, Mark Bauerlein, an English prof at Emory, made an effort to to show why recent efforts to reverse the decline have failed. Rather than selling the great works of Western Civilization for their beauty and wisdom, they're being sold as a means to help men...


In the city, for the city: the end of tips...

Labor laws have exempted restaurants from paying tipped waitstaff normal minimum wage. Instead they've only had to pay a "tipped minimum" to employees whose tips combined with hourly wages averaged at or above the minimum wage paid other workers. Workers in the back of the restaurant don't share the tips waitstaff receive which has led to a growing disparity between waiters, sommeliers, and bartenders, and back of house staff. Cooks make significantly less than waitstaff, but with changes resulting from the recent minimum wage uprising among fast food workers, it's about to get worse.

The tipped minimum wage currently is $5 and the full minimum is $8.75. Starting in January the state tipped minimum will go up fifty percent, from $5 to $7.50, while the regular minimum wage will go up only twenty-five cents, from $8.75 to $9. With cooks working simply for wages and waitstaff adding tips to wages, the inequality between cooks and waiters will get worse.

This has led New York City restauranteur, Danny Meyer, to announce an end to tipping in the thirteen restaurants...


Screwtape's take on current events...

Yesterday I read an Acts 29 pastor's rebuke of a man for calling Christians in his church to turn away from their vain pursuits on social media, spending some of their bandwidth instead on expressing their Christian compassion for the unborn. The pastor said the usual things ordained men without conviction or faith would say to unordained men having both graces: the writer should wait until he had no sin to speak to others about sin; the writer is judgmental/Phariseeical; the writer is making abortion and Planned Parenthood into the only moral issue when there are lots of moral issues; the writer shouldn't exhort church members to speak against Planned Parenthood's sale of dead babies' body parts when those same members have shown their great Christian faith and witness by going on two-week jauntlets to foreign countries; and so on.

Abortion and Planned Parenthood will never end until pastors realize God will hold us accountable for our intensely defended indifference to the innocents being slaughtered down the street from our church-houses. It's no wonder simple Christians living under the authority of such pastors are silent about Planned Parenthood's murder of little babies. Add the R2K ridiculosity and the witches brew is vintaged finely.

Daughter Mrs. Benjamin (Michal) Crum wrote a reflection on the silence of Christians, taking on Lewis's artifice of speaking of these things from Screwtape's perspective. The title of her FB post is "Screwtape's Take on Current Events." Read it and post it yourself...


The death of sodomy and sodomites...

For over a decade on this blog, I've used the word 'sodomy' to refer to... well... sodomy. One of the first to explain to me that the word was offensive was my seminary advisor, Dan Jessen. Since responding to Dan, I've been forced to respond continuously,1 and do still. On FB this week a young woman faulted me for using the word. She pronounced what I'd written to be "extreme," adding helpfully that "extremism of all kinds is dangerous."

What's really dangerous, though, is sodomy. Sodom shows how dangerous it is. God rained fire and brimstone, executing all the people of the city for their indulgence in "gross immorality." And what are we to learn from this? Jude tells us God killed the Sodomites so they would be "exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire."

But at the time, I'm guessing Sodomites would have laughed at being called "sodomites." They would have thought it extreme and pointed out that extremism is dangerous. They would have been tight with Darryl Hart and David VanDrunen's call for the nakedness of their public square. They liked naked...


A Conference on Fatherhood in South Carolina...

Feminists have been beating on the Fatherhood of God for quite some time now. Their hatred for God our Father has sunk so deep that fatherhood itself is seen as unnecessary, at best, or destructively oppressive, at worst. The sickness of our homes, our churches, and our culture can be tied back to this throwing off of God's Fatherhood and the corresponding fatherhood of men. It is nothing less than a rejection of all authority and a loss of the blessings that come with fatherhood: protection, governance, and love. Our daughters defend our country; our wives govern our homes; and our children rebel without any knowledge of the severe love of their father. The damage has been done, but our Father in heaven still rules. He makes things alive even and especially after they die. Such is our prayer for our homes, our churches, and our culture. 

To that end, please help us spread the word about A Conference on Fatherhood with Tim Bayly, September 25-26, at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Spartanburg, SC...

A Conference on Fatherhood with Tim Bayly

There is no higher calling for a man than to be a father, and yet we despise fatherhood. You, me, our culture—we don’t like dads. In fact, we hate them. We don’t ever want to be them. Where does that come from? How do we fix it? If there was ever a time to pray that the Lord would “return the hearts of fathers to their children,” it is now...


To topple abortion, we must strike at the root...

Like many of you, the videos released by the Center for Medical Progress have dominated my thoughts for the past two weeks. I attended the defund Planned Parenthood rally here in Bloomington, and I am glad to see what appears to be real momentum to defund Planned Parenthood. I pray that it continues.

But the very political and social momentum caused by the videos has led me to consider various "what ifs". What if government money was taken away from Planned Parenthood? What if abortion after 20 weeks was made illegal? What if all abortion was made illegal? What then?

As it currently stands, over one million abortions are performed in our country each year. That's over one million sisters, mothers and daughters who decide to kill their own child. That's over one million brothers, fathers, and sons who encourage it, pay for it, or simply split and ignore it. 21% of all U.S. pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion. That's nearly one in four. (Statistics found here.) There is an enormous demand for abortion in this country, and outlawing abortion will not remove that demand...


Planned Parenthood's profits: outrage is now OK...

Women who take money to rip apart babies nestled in their mothers' wombs are murderers and the wickedness of their bloodlust and greed is beyond expression. To traffic in the slaughter of little unborn babies demonstrates a cruelty that is beyond the cruelty of Dachau and Treblinka. There is no greater vulnerability than the child asleep in her mother's womb. She is innocent and defenceless. She is nobody's enemy and mankind's highest duty of protection lodges precisely in her tiny form.

The nation that allows such slaughter to continue on an obscene scale, decade after decade, but then makes a big public show of horror that these women who demand money to slaughter babies also demand money for those babies' body parts is a nation that has gone mad. Shove your knife into the baby and cut off her head and arm and leg, then pull her torso out and toss it in the toilet or dumpster. But how dare you sell that torso! You may take your profit from her murder, but not from the sale of the corpse. 

And so the Washington Post and other house organs of the chattering classes have run articles about Planned Parenthood's Senior Director of Medical Research, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, maximizing the profit of her grisly trade by selling body parts...