Jesus walks on water, and this action reveals his deity. According to Mark 6:48, Jesus “meant to pass by them.” In the Old Testament, God is the one who subdues the waters and treads the waves. That poetic language in the Old Testament takes on a physical sense in the New Testament. The Word became flesh, and the Word walked upon the water.

When Mark reports the miracle of Jesus walking on the water, he uses a line not found in the other Gospel accounts. And this unique line connects us to Old Testament scenes of glory and revelation.
In Mark 6:45–52, the disciples are in a boat and heading to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, without Jesus. Late into the night, the conditions on the water were preventing the disciples from making progress (6:48).
So Jesus approached—without a boat. “And about the fourth watch of the night he came to them, walking on the sea. He meant to pass by them, but when they saw him walking on the sea they thought it was a ghost, and cried out, for they all saw him and were terrified” (Mark 6:48–50).
Let’s compare the other Gospel accounts.

Matthew 14:25–26, “And in the fourth watch of the night he came to them, walking on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, and said, ‘It is a ghost!’ and they cried out in fear.”
Luke’s Gospel does not report this event.
John 6:19, “When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were frightened.”

The Gospel accounts tell us that Jesus was walking on the water during the fourth watch of the night (sometime between 3:00 am and 6:00 am). These accounts also tell us that the disciples had a frightened response.
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As Side B continues to grow, Hill says it has many gifts to offer the broader church, including robust understandings of spiritual friendship and singleness. “I think we challenge the way evangelicalism has often romanticized marriage and child rearing, as though if you want to be mature, you need to be married and having children,” he said.

(RNS)—When Grant Hartley first discovered he was gay at age 13, he adopted what he calls an “ex-gay mindset.” He saw his attractions as a sort of test, something he could overcome with faith. But no amount of prayer changed him.
“I started to think of it more as a gift, as a strength,” said Hartley, now 28 and openly gay. “Maybe there is something about the beauty I am able to see that straight men are not able to see.”
This kind of evolution isn’t unusual among the roughly 4-million LGBTQ Christians in the U.S. But perhaps less commonly, since coming out, Hartley has also chosen to pursue celibacy. While grateful for the experience of being gay, Hartley sees his gay identity as something that goes beyond just sex — “I never say that I’m grateful for same-sex sexual desire,” he said — it also includes aesthetics, culture and worldview.
Hartley is part of a small group of openly LGBTQ Christians who, while embracing their sexual orientation, also believe God designs sex and marriage to occur exclusively between a man and a woman. The group, called “Side B” (as opposed to Side A Christians who celebrate same-sex marriage and sex), is a largely virtual community that sits in a rare liminal space between two sides of a culture war.
Despite their relatively small numbers, the group is experiencing its own renaissance, with thought leaders (like Hartley) producing podcasts and publishing books and group members gathering at conferences.
Many credit Episcopal priest Wesley Hill, now an associate professor of New Testament at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, with being one of the first to outline a “Side B” perspective in 2010. As Side B discourse was finding its way into online forums, the flagship Christian ex-gay organization Exodus International closed its doors in 2013 after decades of using conversion therapy on LGBTQ individuals. Many LGBTQ Christians who had been harmed by the ex-gay approach — but still held to traditional church teachings on marriage — turned to Side B for a more accepting community.
At first, Side B was mostly offering a theological pathway for Christians to both accept LBGTQ as a God-given identity and uphold a traditional stance on sex and marriage. Now, Hartley said, the group has taken on a cultural weight.
“Over time, Side B has felt less like a theological position and more like a distinct sub subculture,” he said.
Many Side B Christians feel called to celibacy, and a select few are in celibate same-sex partnerships or mixed-orientation marriages where one party is straight and the other is not. These experiences have led Side B Christians to develop alternate models of belonging that honor single, celibate lifestyles.
One such model, Hill says, is spiritual friendship, a deeply committed relationship that’s more spiritual vocation than casual Facebook acquaintance. Hill says these sorts of intentional, celibate friendships deserve public recognition and support. Side B folks also find community by creating chosen families — mutual support systems made up of non-related members — or, in the case of Eve Tushnet, through communal acts of service.
“There’s a wide range of ways to give and receive love,” said Tushnet, a gay celibate Catholic writer and speaker with a forthcoming book. “For me personally, my friendships are a huge part of that, and my volunteer work. I volunteer almost exclusively with women. That was the first thing I sought out, when I was trying to figure out, how am I going to lead a life that is in some ways shaped by the love of women.”
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Written by Daniel J. Samet |
Monday, November 13, 2023
Sowell makes it clear that the state should reject the social justice vision and its agenda. The natural end point, he states, is “having government empower surrogate decision-makers to rescue victims of various forms of mistreatment by taking many decisions out of other people’s hands” (82). Our ever-growing administrative state is full of people convinced that others cannot be trusted to do what is best for themselves. We’re left with policies putting the lie to the world envisioned by social justice advocates. Sowell points out “the painful reality . . . that no human being has either the vast range of consequential knowledge, or the overwhelming power, required to make the social justice ideal become a reality” (127). 
         
Another year, another book by Thomas Sowell. It is astonishing that Sowell, 93 years young, scarcely appears to be slowing down. No public intellectual of his generation has been this prolific for this long, save perhaps Henry Kissinger. He’s a veritable national treasure.        
Social Justice Fallacies is classic Sowell. There are no graphs or tables, nor even any cover art. The one and only attraction of the book is Sowell’s air-tight reasoning. It alone justifies the price tag.  
Within its pages is his salvo in our culture war du jour. At a time when activists, scholars, and politicians trot out slogans like “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and “systemic bias,” Sowell has a biting retort. He argues that the social justice agenda they champion is mistaken. It is based on flawed premises and conclusions, inevitably leading to social policies that harm the people they’re supposed to help.        
“You’re entitled to your own opinion,” reads the book’s epigraph, a quote from the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” That’s one way to describe the essence of Sowell’s writing. He does not assert anything without evidence in its defense. If only peddlers of social justice pieties could do the same. To rebut Sowell’s arguments, they will need many facts: facts that do not seem to be in abundance, to put it mildly.   
Take their view that there would be equal outcomes in a world of equal chances, which is the subject of the book’s first chapter. “At the heart of the social justice vision is the assumption that, because economic and other disparities among human beings greatly exceed any differences in their innate capacities, these disparities are evidence or proof of the effects of such human vices as exploitation and discrimination,” Sowell writes (2).
Do human vices explain why NHL players from Canada outnumber those from the United States, despite the fact that Canada has under 1/8th the population of the United States? Why Germans have for centuries been world leaders in beer production? Why Asian Americans have more PhDs in engineering than blacks and Hispanics combined? Why first-born and only children are more likely than other children to reach the highest rungs of the professional ladder as adults? Sowell shows that much else besides exploitation and discrimination accounts for inequality of outcome.
Advocates of social justice deploy flashy terms to justify their agenda, but not hard evidence. “We can read reams of social justice literature without encountering a single example of the proportional representation of different groups in endeavors open to competition— in any country in the world today, or at any time over thousands of years of recorded history,” observes Sowell (2–3). He, however, deploys many past and present examples of the reverse from places as varied as Italy, Malaysia, and South Africa.
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