Our problem is not a lack of resources. But one other thing is clear: we must make time to pray and praise God. If we cannot make and keep appointments with our Triune God, our relationship with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, like any other, will suffer. The invitation is this: have a plan and follow it, pray spontaneously as well, and let all your time be lived out in the presence of our gracious God.

In the early days of his Christian walk, someone said, “I just don’t seem to have time to pray!” A mentor responded in a gentle tone with a stubborn and convicting principle: “you make time for your priorities.” Yet, the question of when to pray is a potent one in the distractedness and business of modern life with its constant connectivity, appointments, virtual appointments, pings, and notifications. Even if we know better than to make excuses for ourselves, the believer who claims a relationship with the living God is commendably concerned about both the quantity and quality of time spent in prayer. While we should clearly pray whenever moved by some external or internal prompting, anything worthy of our attention deserves a dedicated time, no less so the life of prayer.
Seeming to undermine our subject, the Apostle Paul writes these challenging words: “Pray without ceasing.” (1Th 5:17)[1] Assigning a time to prayer would seem too limiting for so grand an activity if we ourselves were not constrained to live one moment after another with a restricted band of attention. Paul’s meaning in the context and in comparison with other texts seems to be that we should not stop praying through changing circumstances that may tempt us to give up (cf. Luke 18:1), in which case it’s the persistence rather than the frequency of our prayers that he has in view. He may also be thinking of maintaining a posture of prayerfulness at all times. But again: anything worthy of our attention deserves time devoted to it.
The Psalmist exclaims, “Seven times a day I praise you for your righteous rules.” (Psalm 119:164)
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This isn’t simply about teaching your students to have a healthy view of their bodies and sex. It’s about teaching your students to view the world in a specific way. This is a worldview issue. Teen Talk plainly says the curriculum’s foundational operating principles include core values “like pro-choice, feminist, sex positive, 2STLGBQ+ positive and using an anti-oppression, decolonizing lens.”

“The future of sex ed has arrived,” declared the headline of an article I recently read. The author went on to discuss changes that have been made to public school curriculums affecting students as young as eleven. The article is four years old.
Fast forward to today. The future is here, and it’s not good. My local board of education adopted a comprehensive sex ed curriculum, Teen Talk. It was touted as a big step forward in educating our public school children. Upon review, I learned the curriculum normalizes questionable sexual ethics, including teen abortion, same-sex intercourse, gender fluidity, and more. This issue isn’t limited to my neck of the woods either. Thirty-nine states mandate sex education. Nine of them mandate that “discussion of LGBTQ identities and relationships be inclusive and affirming.”
There are two main issues here. The first has to do with what’s being taught. The second is the role government schools play in raising your children. Let’s first look at what these new sex ed curriculums teach.
There is some helpful information taught—for instance, discussions about mental health, teen suicide, and self-harm are profitable. However, anything beneficial is undone almost immediately. For example, some teach masturbation and sex as two activities to help distract your student from things like stress and anxiety. This kind of teaching doesn’t help your student deal with the pressures of life. Sex is not a drug or a solution to problems. It is not therapy, and in many cases it only complicates life. Even worse, when we view sex this way, people become a commodity, a means to an end, a temporary relief from pain, objects to be used for a quick fix. Not human beings. Not persons of infinite value and worth.
There’s more. This isn’t simply about teaching your students to have a healthy view of their bodies and sex. It’s about teaching your students to view the world in a specific way. This is a worldview issue. Teen Talk plainly says the curriculum’s foundational operating principles include core values “like pro-choice, feminist, sex positive, 2STLGBQ+ positive and using an anti-oppression, decolonizing lens.”
This shouldn’t surprise us.
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Written by Dr. Benjamin Mabry |
Wednesday, May 22, 2024
If Christianity does not authentically inform your entire worldview, including the criteria by which you judge the most important things of this world, then how can you say that you’re any different than the unbeliever? 

“Hi, my name is Dr. Benjamin L. Mabry, and I’m a Critical Theorist.” It sounds to many ears like the kind of thing I should be confessing to a pastor or therapist, but in fact there’s nothing anti-Christian about Critical Theory. It is probably the lack of Critical Theory that is more problematic than its presence. The reason most people resist this conclusion is that they’re used to people using Critical Theory to push divisive, racist blame rhetoric, and therefore associate an important science with race-baiting and political opportunism. Critical Theory is one of the core sciences of philosophy, and the neglect of critical theory leads only to confusion about the most important issues facing orthodox and faithful Christians today.
Let’s start with the most basic question. What is Critical Theory? Critical Theory is so basic to philosophy that it doesn’t need to be named in most of the Western tradition. It is the science of criteria for judgment. Critical Theory became important in the 19th Century as the fundamental questions about the criteria of definitions were questioned by scientific worldviews that tried to reduce reality to physical bodies or sense perceptions. Philosophers struggled over the fundamental question of Critical Theory: how to define a thing, and on what basis can a judgment be called true or false. Before the members of the “Frankfurt School” were ever born, philosophers like Edmund Husserl wrote volumes over the questions of justifying their definitions for the basic elements of reality. Catholic philosopher Max Scheler argued for a return to the basic sciences of Man, ethics, and virtue, which built on Husserl’s principles to clarify and sometimes correct the definitions inherited from the Christian medieval tradition. The modern-day dispute over the definition of a human being, of Man and Woman, is not unique to our decadent generation.
Why do criteria matter? Let me use an example. When “deconstructionists” criticize the Word of God on the basis of so-called justice or love, their thought process is to judge the Word on the basis of their pre-existing definitions of justice and love. Where do they get their definitions of justice or love, however? They get their definitions of those things from the culture in which they grew up. The criteria they use to define those words are the culturally contingent assumptions, prejudices, and stereotypes of the society, time, and culture of the present day. Deconstructionist arguments basically begin with a set of modernist prejudices, which they use as criteria to define justice and love, which they the use as criteria to judge the Word of God as false. It rests on the assumption that the ideological fashions and opinions of the current time are the final word on the ultimate questions of life, and not merely the fickle and silly vacillations of popular opinion and elite interests in the moment. Is it not absurd to try to judge God and his timeless, ageless, universal Word by the unserious, erratic, temporary fashions of the present age? Isn’t it more rational to define justice and love based on something eternal like the Word of God, and then judge this shifting sands culture against the Solid Rock?
Critical Theory gets its dirty reputation primarily from the dominant “Frankfurt School” of the post-World War period. Herbert Marcuse, most famously, used the techniques of Critical Theory to weaponize the definitions of words for the benefit of his Communist agenda. Whereas Max Scheler attempted to derive objective meanings for value-words like justice, nobility, and utility, Marcuse invented the notion of “transvaluation,” in which the definitions of value-words were inverted in order to pervert the moral order of society.
Why do high-school television dramas make the athletic, beautiful, or congenial characters into moral monsters, and only ascribe moral goodness to unattractive, unathletic, and socially maladapt characters? This association of natural gifts with moral depravity is a “revenge” that TV writers play on the people whom they envied in high school. By tracing the criteria that they use to judge their characters, they reveal key characteristics of their worldview. The typical writer of such a show was probably middle class but felt poor in relation to the popular kids. They envied the kinds of people they demonize in their stories but were probably ignored rather than tormented. The characteristics which they pretend to have are transferred to the heroes: intelligence, disdain for conformity, a secret hero complex or for females a secret beauty complex. However, the key tell is the way their negative attributes, like abrasiveness or antisociality, are transvalued into a false virtue of honesty or resistance to injustice.
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