Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, June 2, 2024
Think Christianly, friends. When you do, you’ll find that the world is not just an arrow pointing to the heavens but a gift from the hand of the God who loves you. Delight in it, explore it, discover it, conquer it, and exercise dominion over it. When you know how to look you’ll find that written through the core of everything is Jesus’ smile, beckoning you in love to die and rise again.

We have an intellectual problem in the modern West. We’ve forgotten the intellectual underpinnings of all knowledge.
That’s Jesus by the way.
The resurrection of Jesus is the central beating fact of all existence. Our response to it is the core of our lives. Christians whose lives look the same as their neighbours are a deep sadness, a withered tree.
Anderson, who my writing has been meandering with for a little while now, states it like this:

God’s love in Jesus Christ is the open secret of the cosmos.
Called into Questions, 111
Our intellectual inquiry is supposed to start here. All our thinking is to start here. All our lives are to start here. Whatever you do for a living is dramatically shifted and changed by Jesus, as is everything else in your life.
This is what it is to think Christianly: to start with the revelation of God in Christ and then move outwards towards other disciplines.
How is Mathematics different? Or tax law? Or plumbing?
I suspect most of us want to say that I’m over-spiritualising things and that honestly most of life continues on unabated. I simply don’t think that can be true. The way we view the world has to start with Jesus.
There is no such thing as being ‘unbiased.’ You cannot start your thinking, or your doing, from a neutral place. That standpoint doesn’t exist. This all sounds very critical theory, but that isn’t what I mean. What I mean is that we are never formless and void, we are given as children a way of looking at the world. We are, as Anderson puts it, ‘indoctrinated into a way of seeing things.’
Everyone is. We all have it. This is what some people call ‘worldview.’ I’m not sure that’s the best framing, but the lens that we look at everything through is what we mean. You see life through lenses you’ve been given. I’m saying we should see life through Jesus lenses. We should also think through Jesus lenses.
This all sounds very academic, I appreciate. That is my propensity. What difference does it make to the average person? Well, everyone is thinking about their lives all the time. Everyone needs to learn to think Christianly.
How do you decide who to marry? Or what house to rent or buy?
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Written by Benjamin J. McFarland |
Friday, July 5, 2024
In the twentieth century, Lehman was given the third verse of “The Love of God” first as an act of grace, communicated globally and over centuries, not last as an instant and focused deus ex machina to his initial efforts. He held onto that third verse like a diamond in the rough. Then, when it was time, Lehman fashioned the two previous verses for the diamond’s setting.

I want to tell stories that reveal deep truths. I never want to “tell stories” in the sense of making stuff up. This May, during a devotional for our Faculty Senate meeting, I told my colleagues a story that I hoped was in the former category. And it was—once my colleague helped me see through the parts that were simply made up.
I told the story of how Fredrick M. Lehman and his daughter W.W. Mays wrote the hymn “The Love of God.” I drew from several sites on the internet that share how they had written the first two verses but were stuck needing a third, when it was provided in a remarkable way:
During their travels, the father/daughter team came across a German insane asylum. One of the prisoners had recently been put to death, and when the soldiers examined his cell afterwards they found the following words penciled onto the walls of his prison:
     ‘Could we with ink the ocean fill,     And were the skies of parchment made,     Were every stalk on earth a quill,     And every man a scribe by trade;     To write the love of God above,     Would drain the ocean dry.     Nor could the scroll contain the whole,     Though stretched from sky to sky.’
…  F.M. Lehman and his daughter were amazed—the words etched onto the walls of this asylum matched the rhythm of their new hymn perfectly. They inserted these words as the third and final verse of their hymn and published The Love of God by 1920.1
This miraculous story spoke to me of God providing through words scrawled on hidden walls. All of us in higher education, experiencing turbulent times with more turbulence ahead, need to be reminded of God’s provision. This image promised that God would provide for our needs, even through eccentric means. So I told it.
Yet some elements of the story nagged at me. Its cited source is a 1950 journal for pastors, not likely to have rigorous historical peer review. The poem itself was reasonably attributed to an eleventh-century Hebrew source from Germany, so could it have been passed down locally to a prisoner almost a thousand years later?
But then, why would it be written on a German wall in an English translation that precisely fit the meter of the other two verses? And how could Lehman and his daughter travel to Germany, when he had “lost everything in business and found himself working manual labor in a California packing house”?2 It didn’t add up. As I told the story to my colleagues, I mentioned my skepticism, which now ameliorates my embarrassment at repeating a story that turned out to be too glib and too easy. The truth of how God worked was much bigger than that story allowed.
Immediately after the meeting, my friend Steve Perisho found me. Steve is SPU’s Librarian for Theology, Philosophy, and History, and we were co-leading a reading group on Gregory of Nyssa. Steve is the consummate librarian: He obtained for our group not just a few reference works on Gregory of Nyssa, but an entire shelf-full of books including the massive 10-volume Lexicon Gregorianium. Steve knows how to trace a story back to its source.
I thought Steve would offer to investigate the loose ends of the story. Instead, Steve had already investigated them (Steve works fast). We would continue to pull on the loose ends to reveal a more complicated truth that, even after a lot of work, is still incomplete.
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Written by Christopher F. Rufo |
Tuesday, October 24, 2023
The outcome of “decolonization” is barbarism. For Hamas, it means murdering women, children, and the elderly, executing innocent people on the street, and mutilating infants in their homes. For the radical academics, the process is less brutal but barbaric all the same: it means destroying our best institutions, obliterating academic standards, and elevating witchcraft, voodoo, and pseudo-science into positions of prestige. The philosopher Leo Strauss once defined nihilism as opposition to civilization as such—and this is precisely what the decolonizing academics have done, acting out their vengeful fantasies to “abolish” Harvard, once a crowning symbol of Western civilization.

Harvard finds itself in an ideological bind. Following Hamas’s horrific terror attack against Israel, the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee issued a statement, co-signed by 33 other student groups, blaming the Jewish state for the murder, rape, and mutilation of its own citizens by Hamas. “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the statement read. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”
The reaction was swift. The media, the public, and prominent political figures condemned the students for rationalizing atrocities against innocent people, including women, children, and the elderly. Harvard’s administration, long accustomed to toeing the radical line, hesitated for days before releasing a generic statement of condemnation and writing that “no student group—not even 30 student groups—speaks for Harvard University or its leadership.”
Meantime, former Harvard president Lawrence Summers expressed surprise, wondering on social media why the university could not “find anything approaching the moral clarity of Harvard statements after George Floyd’s death or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
It is hard to believe that Summers is being sincere. As anyone in Harvard’s orbit would know—especially a long-time professor and former university president—the politics of decolonization, critical race theory, and anti-Israel agitation has been a staple of public life on that campus for decades. And it is not a cause driven solely by misguided students: administrators, department leaders, and prominent faculty have all developed it, institutionalized it, or at least publicly deferred to the radicals who did.
One needs only to browse the current Harvard course catalog to see how deeply the rhetoric of “decolonization” has been embedded. One course, “Global Rebellion: Race, Solidarity, and Decolonization,” draws on critical ethnic studies, a subfield of critical race theory, and promises to promote “Black, Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous radicalism”—that is, left-wing ethnopolitics for everyone except whites and Jews. The goal, according to the course description, is to “discuss how BIPOC communities forged cross-racial, internationalist solidarities to rebel against global white supremacy.”
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