Written by John Stonestreet and Timothy D. Padgett |
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
In a turn that Orwell warned us about, dissent is considered danger, words are violence, opinions are hate, and yesterday’s truths are today’s terror. Tragedies and crises become crass opportunities to promote a viewpoint. We need not prove our ideological enemy is guilty of a crime, only that they’re on the wrong side of history.  

On Thanksgiving Day, the entrance to the Focus on the Family offices was vandalized. The perpetrators, referring to the recent mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, spray-painted “Blood is on your hands!” and “Five lives taken!” Additionally, they left a sign that quoted 2 Corinthians 11:14-15, implying that the organization did the devil’s work.  
Two days earlier, an opinion piece in The New York Times also blamed Focus on the Family for the murders: “When I heard the news about the shooting at Club Q, an L.G.B.T.Q. nightclub in Colorado Springs, I couldn’t help but think of the rhetoric spewed by those like James Dobson.”  Many other news reports, articles, opinion pieces, and tweets explicitly connected the shooting to Focus on the Family, other evangelical organizations, churches, and even the military bases of Colorado Springs. 
The group who claimed responsibility for the vandalism never used the phrase “stochastic terrorism,” but their reasoning relied on it. Much of the media coverage, in fact, did employ this phrase that is now increasingly being used to direct blame. In this case, anyone who advocated against same-sex marriage, opposed LGBTQ advocacy in schools and libraries, or suggested that sexual orientation and gender confusion are not immutable identities is guilty of “hate speech” and complicit in this act of terrorism. 
The shooter has no known connection with Focus on the Family. No one at Focus on the Family participated in or praised the violence. The man who did the killing appears to have been a member of the extended LGBTQ community and, like many other mass shooters, grew up alienated from his father in a terribly broken family. None of that matters to those who’ve already determined who the guilty parties are. 
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by John Stonestreet and Timothy D. Padgett |
Saturday, November 5, 2022
In and of itself, pain is not good, but it is meaningful. Pain indicates that something is wrong and needs to be addressed. Without pain, we’d never know. In the same way, breaking bad habits of the past requires pushing beyond our comfort levels, through the pain, and onward on the path to full restoration. 

One of the most beloved and quotable scenes in The Chronicles of Narnia is from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when the children learn that Aslan is a lion, “the Lion, the great Lion.”  
“Ooh!” said Susan, “I’d thought he was a man. Is he—quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” 
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver…. “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” 
Though we love the idea that God is not “safe,” we often live as if our safety or comfort marks the boundaries of our relationship with Him. Catechized by bad theology, captivated by our culture’s enablement of self-centeredness, or weary of an angry and fractious age, many Christians cannot conceive that God’s will for our lives could involve anything unpleasant or uncomfortable.  
When it does and our expectations collapse, we wonder if God cares, having conflated God’s faithfulness with a painless, placid life of blessing and provision. We are quick to assume that pain or discomfort means that God’s will has been thwarted, or that His love and protection have been withdrawn. It’s difficult to accept that, rather than a sign of God’s absence, the presence of pain could be a sign of His sovereign care. 
Throughout The Horse and His Boy, Aslan continually allows fear, hardship, and even physical pain for the main characters. When Shasta, one of the two main humans in the story, is fleeing from his abusive adoptive father on the Narnian horse Bree, a lion chases them through the darkness. Fleeing from the danger, he encounters another rider fleeing from, it seems, another lion. Aravis is also escaping her home on a talking Narnian horse. Their shared fear and confusion bring them together for a journey neither of them could have made without the other. 
Read More
Related Posts:

Though Italian politics does not typically dominate English-speaking Twitter, a speech by Giorgia Meloni, expected to soon become Italy’s first female prime minister, recently caught the attention of a great many around the world.  
The speech was from 2019. In it, Meloni decried the practice of commercial surrogacy, rebuked the heedless rush to chemically castrate teens with gender dysphoria, praised the natural family as the basis of society, called out the evils of euthanasia and abortion, and defended her identity as not just a citizen of the world but as someone both Italian and Christian. She closed with a quote from G.K. Chesterton, one of many predictions he made that has come true: “Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in the summer.”  
It was refreshing to hear classical truths of Western civilization defended with such passion. Many political and cultural conservatives, both in America and around the world, praised her, holding up her words as a model of what it means to resist progressivism’s continued march across institutions. Many media outlets, on the other hand, quickly labeled her “far right,” “nationalist,” and even “fascist.” 
Most of these critiques can be dismissed with ease. After all, it’s not uncommon for journalists to describe anything or anyone not fully on board with progressive ideologies as “far right,” the mildest expressions of patriotism as “nationalist,” and any conservative ideal as “fascist.” Multiple news agencies have noted that Meloni’s political party has roots in the remnants of Italy’s Mussolini era, a level of scrutiny most political parties would not survive. 
Read More

How did things in Afghanistan change so dramatically, seemingly overnight? How did a decades-long, frustrating stalemate become the greatest American foreign policy debacle in 50 years? A nation is left asking, “What went wrong?”
The most immediate explanation is the way the withdrawal was handled, from pulling out troops before evacuating citizens and allies, to abandoning the Bagram Air Base. These details and others are hard to explain.
A common, longer-view explanation is that the War in Afghanistan ultimately failed because the United States shifted focus from fighting terrorism to nation-building. Nation-building can be formally defined as “the process through which the boundaries of the modern state and those of the national community become congruent.” In practice, nation-building is far more complicated. Attempting to rebuild essential cultural and institutional elements of another country rarely goes well.
America’s view of nation-building tends to change. In defending his recent decisions, President Biden has spoken derisively of nation-building, even saying that it “never made sense” to him. Yet, that claim was fact-checked by the Washington Post: apparently, he was for it until he was against it.
Many condemn nation-building, not so much because it’s wrong as because it’s impossible. Cultures run too deep, they say, to change from the outside. No weapon or army is stronger than a people’s will to resist. Just consider Afghanistan (twice), Vietnam, or the collapse of European empires.
On the other hand, it’s also true that national borders can change, languages do shift, religions reform, and whole civilizations rise and fall. In recent years, powerhouses like Germany and Japan each went from global menace to responsible neighbor. India, Korea, Taiwan, Dubai, and Singapore have changed dramatically in just a few generations. Cultures do change. Not always and not easily, but they can and do change.
Read More