Christian Living, Culture, Politics
John Beeson
Uprooting Our Political Identity

Happy election day!

In 2016, data scientists Eitan Hersh and Yair Ghitza analyzed data among registered voters to determine how often Democrats and Republicans married. They learned that 9% of marriages had the spouses registered in the two parties. Over the next four years that meager number would drop precipitously, down to 4%.

 As Jonathan Haidt and others have successfully argued, the ideological disparity between FOX News and CNBC are child’s play compared to the engineered social media algorithms that create hermetically sealed echo chambers for our political views.

Uprooting Our Political Identity
Abortion, Christian Living, Culture, Politics
John Beeson
Protecting the Voice of the Voiceless

The tide of public opinion on abortion has ebbed dramatically over the past two years. On Friday, June 22, the Supreme Court handed down one of the most critical decisions in our lifetime: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Forty-nine years of nationally enshrined abortion rights were pushed down to the states. The battle was not over, but had just begun. Pro-lifers who thought this was the beginning of a new pro-life era were in for a disappointment. The reaction from the pro-choice community was strong and their response led to a wave of support for their cause leaving many pro-lifers flat-footed.

Protecting the Voice of the Voiceless
Christian Living, Culture, Death, Fear
John Beeson
What Spooks You?

Across the street from our home is the holiday house. You probably have one in your neighborhood. They go all out for every holiday. On Saturday, cars stacked up on the main road leading into the neighborhood as families drove by slowly, taking in the massive display that must have cost the owners thousands of dollars.

 

Last week I drove by a home whose Halloween decorations weren’t as massive or ostentatious, but the lawn display was undoubtedly the eeriest I’ve ever seen. A life-like severed head hung from a tree limb. A decapitated corpse with a visible spinal cord jutting out between slumped shoulders sat underneath.

What Spooks You?
Christian Living, Culture, Fear, Wisdom
John Beeson
The Temptation of Temptation

In 2023, 46 horror movies were released. 75 million tickets were sold, and the industry made $798 million in domestic revenue alone. It’s been argued that horror movies remain a draw for many in the contemporary West because there is so little actual danger in most of our lives.

 

Atheist Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature argues that we live in the most peaceful era of human existence: wars have decreased, human rights have expanded, and rates of starvation and lifespans have improved. Drawn to conflict, we now have access to global news coverage, which gives us the dopamine hit of feeling like we are in conflict.

The Temptation of Temptation
Christian Living, Fear, Spiritual Growth, Wisdom
John Beeson
Night

What attracts us so much to the dark?

In the story of Swan Lake, a ballet by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Prince Siegfried falls in love with Odette (who has been cursed by the evil magician, Von Rothbart), after happening upon her at the lake one night during a hunting trip.  As a result of Von Rothbart's curse, Odette is human only at nightfall, for at daybreak she transforms into a swan.  True and faithful love is the only thing that can break the curse, and Siegfried aims to marry Odette, proclaiming such love, at a ball his mother is throwing for his birthday. 

Night

Ten Commandments

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Maybe you don’t need a therapist: O. Alan Noble says, “I suspect that many people don’t need to see a therapist, or will only need to see one for a brief time to deal with an acute problem like the loss of a loved one. Everyone will suffer. Everyone will need wise counsel and encouragement and guidance and someone to talk to, but not everyone needs that guidance to come from a licensed mental health professional.”

  2. We can’t be friends: T.M. Suffield writes on the absence of deep male friendship and how to buck the trend, “And perhaps,

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The gods fight for our devotion

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The gods fight for our devotion

The competition for your devotion is fierce.

I’ve had the opportunity to visit India four times. One of the first things that strikes you as a Westerner is how different religious devotion manifests in this country. In this Hindu nation, the competition for devotion is manifested in the temples—some lavish, some simple—erected to the 33 million Hindu gods. The gods scuttle for devotion based on geographic region, power, and personality.

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Am I Good Enough?

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Am I Good Enough?

How good am I? Am I good enough?

We all wrestle with these questions in different ways and at different times. We reflexively answer these questions through comparison. How happy am I? How generous am I? How successful am I? How smart am I? We consider our family, friends, and neighbors and make an evaluation.

But if the age of social media has taught us anything, hasn’t it taught us how destructive comparison is? Hasn’t it shown us that comparison reveals the basest version of ourselves? Hasn’t social media taught us how fragile and finicky the rubric of comparison is?

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The Gods Fight for Your Devotion

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The Gods Fight for Your Devotion

The competition for your devotion is fierce.

We just arrived in India: it’s my second time visiting this beautiful nation. One of the first thing that strikes you as a Westerner is just how different religious devotion manifests itself in this country. In this Hindu nation, the competition for devotion is manifested in the temples—some lavish, some simple—erected to the 33 million Hindu gods. The gods scuttle for devotion based on geographic region, power, and personality.

If Hinduism is foreign to you, you might roll your eyes at the idea of 33 million gods clamoring for your devotion. It might as foolish as believing that leprechauns are at the end of a rainbow or that there are unicorns sipping water in faraway forests.

American Gods

And yet, is our context any different? There are no fewer gods fighting for our hearts in America than there are in India.

Many Christians would be on guard in a Hindu context. You might even feel a measure of oppression passing in front of a Hindu temple. Perhaps it would make you pause and pray. And yet, the gods of the Western world barely register in our daily lives.

What gods am I speaking of? The gods of self, pride, respect, lust, comfort, distraction, law, religion, bitterness, fear, and anxiety fight for our hearts. The demigods of money, vocation, social media, job titles, cable, internet, sexuality, cell phones, productivity, health, pornography, education, body-image, cars, spouses, children, friends, sports, and on and on can do the bidding of gods.

33 million doesn’t seem like such an overwhelming number all of a sudden.

How to Know You’re Good

How to Know You’re Good

How good are you? That is a question we all wrestle with in different ways and at different times. But we almost all answer it with the same methodology: comparison. But if the age of social media has taught us anything, hasn’t it taught us how destructive comparison is? Hasn’t it shown us that comparison reveals the basest version of ourselves? Hasn’t social media taught us how fragile and finicky the rubric of comparison is?

How then can we know how good we really are? Maybe the answer lies in some time-tested standard outside of ourselves and outside of our neighbor? Maybe there is a standard outside ourselves to evaluate ourselves by.

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Shining Idols: A Rejected Covenant

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Shining Idols: A Rejected Covenant

Last week we started considering how idolatry might still be alive and well in us today.

To do so, we took ourselves back to the most famous incident of idolatry in the Bible: the golden calf.[i] The Israelites created the golden calf at the very time God is giving Moses the Ten Commandments.

The Ten Commandments capture God’s covenant with his people. God declares, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.”[ii]  The covenant begins with a statement of who God is: he is the saving God, the rescuing God. God then promises that his covenant is exclusive. In weddings the pastor asks the groom, do you promise to “love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, and forsaking all others, be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?” And then he turns to the bride and asks her a similar set of questions. A marriage covenant is exclusive. In it we relinquish our authority. So is our covenant with God.

As she creates the golden calf, Israel rejects the covenant and takes her authority back. The covenant that was made with God is now broken. Israel is an adulteress. As pastor Tim Keller once said, “We never break the other commandments without breaking the first one.”[iii]

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.      What I Learned About Marriage by Losing My Husband: Good luck not tearing up reading Gaye Clark's poignant letter to her deceased husband.

2.      Be a Gospel Neighbor: Aaron Menikoff on a topic I think is so important for the church, "The requirement for hospitality gets to the heart of neighboring. It’s even a qualification of elder leadership... Paul has a similar message in Romans 12:13–14: “Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” Paul demands a spirit of generosity to all: the brother or sister, the stranger, and even the enemy! Faithful pastors and Christians alike will strive to be good neighbors. They’ll open up their homes to people around them. Such hospitality is not without cost (it takes time and money)."

3.      Which of the Ten Commandments Still Apply? YouGov and Deseret News reports that 60% of Americans agree that seven of the Ten Commandments still apply. The three below 60%? "You shall have no other gods before me," "You shall not use the name of the Lord your God in vain," and "Remember to keep the Sabbath day holy" (the only commandment below 50%). 

4.      What Dostoyevsky's Prostitute Can Teach Us About Love: If you've ever read Crime and Punishment (which I recently had the joy of re-reading), this is powerful connection between the cross and the book. Mark Galli connects Sonia's reaction to the Christ, "Raskolnikov later meets a young woman, Sonia, who has been compelled by poverty to become a prostitute to support her family. He is immediately drawn to her, and after he learns that Sonia had been friends with Lizaveta, he feels compelled to confess his murders to her... When it dawns on her what he has just confessed, “...What have you done—what have you done to yourself?” she said in despair, and, jumping up, she flung herself on his neck, threw her arms round him, and held him tightly." Raskolnikov is not the only one who is shocked by Sonia’s gesture. The reader is as well... There we see the meaning of the Cross and the revelation of the deepest nature of God. Jesus did not consider the glory of divinity as something to exalt in, but decided to bear the yoke of human nature. He showed himself not only to be a man of sorrows, but also a God who has borne our griefs; not merely a man wounded for our transgression, but also a God bruised for our iniquities (Isa. 53). He saw the grievous sin of humankind, and the Cross is the sign of his “violent, hysterical weeping” for us."

5.      Death Valley Sunup to Sundown: Think Death Valley is ugly? Think again. This is stunning.

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