Telling Corrie’s Story
The Watchmaker’s Daughter sets out to tell what The Hiding Place left out, and it succeeds. Loftis intersperses accounts familiar to The Hiding Place readers with details of Allied and Nazi military tactics and espionage attempts as well as wartime experiences of Anne Frank and Audrey Hepburn, who both lived in the Netherlands at the time. Loftis includes Corrie’s post-war travel, as she told her family’s story in more than 60 countries, and a final section that tells what happened to several people during or after the war.
Millions of people have read the Ten Boom family story of courage and faithfulness during World War II as shared in the 1971 bestseller The Hiding Place. Corrie ten Boom, along with her father and sister, coordinated underground work during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, hiding Jews and other underground workers in their home. Larry Loftis’ The Watchmaker’s Daughter (William Morrow 2023) pulls together information from letters, journals, and books written by Ten Boom family members or their friends to tell about their underground activities and their faith even after Nazis arrested them.
The Watchmaker’s Daughter sets out to tell what The Hiding Place left out, and it succeeds.
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Why Mixing Up Social Justice and Biblical Justice Matters
Many Christians in the West recognise that they have received blessings that others have not. We have education, wealth, and opportunities that many around our world do not. Social justice advocates want us to feel guilty about this and to see it as a privilege for which we should automatically feel ashamed. If we allow this, the unrelenting psychological pressure exerted by social justice thinking will weigh very heavily upon our consciences. This is a great error.
Some see the evangelical debate about social justice as a disagreement on strategy or emphasis. But it is much more than that. If the language of social justice is incompatible with biblical justice, then using it to connect with our culture is not an error of strategy but a change in theology. This matters.
Church history has many examples of debates which would have been better undertaken in private or perhaps not at all. Paul’s command to ‘make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace’ (Ephesians 4:3) is always vital to remember.
Is the debate about social justice and the woke agenda one over which evangelical Christians should agree to disagree? I don’t believe it is. Some disagreements are particularly important because they impact upon truths at the heart of the gospel – this is one of them.
The social justice of our day is seen in the efforts of Black Lives Matter and the climate change emergency coalition. The justice they are seeking is about ‘the redistribution of wealth, privileges and opportunities… [it is about] equity, not equality… so it is redistribution with a view toward achieving equal outcomes for various specified groups’ – Voddie Baucham
When I use the term social justice, I am not referring to the diligent pursuit of fairness and justice by Christians in the past. Their actions reflected the principles of biblical justice, grounded in the character of God and expressed in his moral law. William Wilberforce laboured for decades to outlaw the slave trade, and his victory brought real freedom for many. His efforts were not in pursuit of the kind of social justice that is being advocated today.
The social justice of our day is seen in the efforts of Black Lives Matter and the climate change emergency coalition. The justice they are seeking is about ‘the redistribution of wealth, privileges and opportunities… [it is about] equity, not equality…(Voddie Baucham).
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Abortion Is Shameful, Act like It
Most abortions are committed by women destined to remain childless. A vast majority of normal American women intend never to commit an abortion, never do, and instead want to start a family. Rejecting abortions is normal. Having abortions is not.
Recently in Ohio, a constitutional amendment to allow some abortion-on-demand narrowly passed a popular referendum. The amendment would have failed had only about seven percent of voters switched from “yes” to “no.” This contrasts with recent pro-life wins in states that are in some cases arguably less red than Ohio such as the traditional swing state of Florida, Texas, and the blue-leaning state of Georgia. There, Republicans who passed laws that protect unborn babies with heartbeats have lately won statewide and even won big.
The Ohio setback is what results when the political right argues law instead of culture. The right outsourced its arguments on abortion mostly to its kindly Christian women, who have so far avoided using one of the most powerful tools they have: Shame. But shame is the way to train abortion proponents to care about the unborn, and shame comes from culture.
The political left knows this well. The left for a century has changed culture before law, turning the unimaginable into the standard, through relentless campaigns of public shaming. That’s how it trained a generation to avoid fanciful horrors of the so-called “politically incorrect,” even though no one ever believed it. The political right, if only it is willing, can far more quickly teach a generation to avoid real horrors everyone already knows are wrong.
The Median Abortion Seeker Is Far from the Median Woman
Trained to avoid the politically incorrect, much of the right assumes that condemning women who get abortions is like staring at a solar eclipse: something you just can’t do. But the left’s cultural wins are reversing. As more and more reject the bizarre racial and sexual pities of the aughts and the vapid norms of the nineties from which they sprang, now is the time to question whether it really is bad to shame women when they kill their children. Now is the time to break free from the Millian paradigm that negates historically normal enforcement of social norms and morality: shame and stigma. These things are always operative anyway. It is just a question of which morality governs and what “lifestyles” are elevated.
There aren’t many women to shame anyway. The typical woman is far from the typical woman who commits abortion. Roughly half of all abortions are committed by women who have already had at least one. About a fifth of women who get abortions have several. Overall, only about one in ten who get pregnant ever go on to commit even one abortion.
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“Smartphones as Security Blankets” Prevent Us from Living Fully Human Lives
It is an irony that the very devices that are causing us so much stress—through non-stop social media, doom-scrolling the latest pandemic or war news, the fear of missing out on what is going on right now—have also become pacifiers that make us less likely to actually do something.
(LifeSiteNews)—A Saturday column in the Washington Post posed an unsettling question: “Are smartphones serving as adult pacifiers?” It begins with the story of a UPenn assistant professor observing that while working on her PhD, she often reached for her phone when she was stressed. “Just holding it made me feel good,” Shiri Melumud said. “It gave me a sense of ease or calm. It was similar to children who seek out their pacifiers when they are stressed. For many of us, our phone represents an attachment object, much as a security blanket or teddy bear does for a child.”
At first glance, the comparison doesn’t seem apt. After all, our smartphones often cause us active stress — social media companies intentionally use anger, fear, division, lust, or loneliness to monetize our attention and drag our eyeballs past more ads to keep their tabs running higher. But Melumud’s comparison went further. Like children, she noted, we often “become frantic” when we misplace our omnipresent smartphones, which serve as digital security blankets. We use them constantly, and for everything. We route our lives through these devices.
But as it turns out, the role of smartphones in our lives may be even larger than we thought. According to the Post: “[S]cientists studying the relationship between people and their smartphones also have come up with additional insights in recent years about how people behave when using them, including discovering that people can draw needed comfort by their mere presence.” In short, we genuinely form “a deep personal connection with our phones” that become, in some senses, extensions of our personalities—and we open up more on our phones than in other spheres of our lives.