History, Spiritual Growth, Suffering, Wisdom
John Beeson
Lord, Reach Your Justice Down

I had outsized emotions as a child. Games, especially, would get the best of me, whether cards or boardgames or sports. In response to a stroke of bad luck, a hot surge of anger would erupt, followed quickly by tears and then embarrassment.

Emotions are God’s gift to us in many ways. They are one of his kind ways of showing us where our deep attachments lie.

Our son started his freshman year at the University of Arizona this fall. It’s been a great experience for him, but not without its adjustments. The climate of a secular school is quite different than the Christian school he graduated from

Lord, Reach Your Justice Down
Culture, Generosity, Nature, Relationships
John Beeson
Marshmallows and Friends

Most have heard of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment. In 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel invited kids into his lab. A child was offered a marshmallow that they could eat, or, if they waited until the researcher returned, they were given a second marshmallow. About one-third of the kids waited approximately fifteen minutes for the additional reward.

The study then tracked those children over time and found that children who waited for the second reward tended to have higher SAT scores and lower body mass indexes. Later tests have challenged those outcomes, but it hasn’t stopped parents everywhere from running the experiment on their kids, often with humorous results.

Marshmallows and Friends
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?

justice

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Lord, Reach Your Justice Down

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Lord, Reach Your Justice Down

I had outsized emotions as a child. Games, especially, would get the best of me, whether cards or boardgames or sports. In response to a stroke of bad luck, a hot surge of anger would erupt, followed quickly by tears and then embarrassment.

Emotions are God’s gift to us in many ways. They are one of his kind ways of showing us where our deep attachments lie.

Our son started his freshman year at the University of Arizona this fall. It’s been a great experience for him, but not without its adjustments. The climate of a secular school is quite different than the Christian school he graduated from

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This Week's Reflections

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This Week's Reflections

Typically in this space, I point you to some of the best articles I've found that I hope will edify you. During this challenging week that has seen our country torn apart in the wake of a series of injustices against black men and women that received national attention, I offer reflections from men and women I am listening to and learning from. Some of those below are personal friends.

I recognize that the issues are complicated. There are no easy answers. As a Christian I believe that not only is every individual a sinner, but every system in this world is broken as well. There is no just person and there is no just system.

Furthermore, while every person is sinful and every system is broken, there are godly men and women who are protesting and there are godly men and women who are serving in law enforcement. I’m grateful for every fellow believer striving to live out Christ’s prayer, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Our only hope is in our God who can unite Jew and Gentile, change the heart of the murderous Paul, and who will bring about perfect justice on that final day.

Your co-laborer,

John

"Evangelicalism needs a more humble posture of receiving and learning. Allow the church that has been deemed the other, the marginalized church, to be the teacher at this moment, and to have the most dominant form of the church in America be the student who is learning to share power."

Efrem Smith

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We are Poor, Wayfaring Strangers

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We are Poor, Wayfaring Strangers

Two weeks ago, we watched the poignant movie 1917. The film follows two soldiers' one day mission to try to save 1,600 of their comrades from a trap the German army had sprung on the British forces in WWI. Filmed intimately through a single camera that follows the harrowing trek of the two young men, 1917 immerses you in the brutality and despair of war.

During one scene, having escaped death narrowly by jumping into a river, Corporal Schofield looks up to see cherry blossoms gently falling overhead. They swirl in the river's current and surround him. Schofield's eyes widen as he takes in the moment. But the heavenly reprieve comes to an abrupt end as Schofield floats into a mass of corpses.

As Schofield stumbles out of the water, he hears a single voice singing in the distance,

I'm just a poor wayfaring stranger
Traveling through this world below
There is no sickness, no toil, nor danger
In that bright land to which I go

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Evil and the Justice of God by NT Wright

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Evil and the Justice of God by NT Wright

After NT Wright completed his seminal work on the resurrection of Jesus: The Resurrection of the Son of God he planned on writing a follow-up on the crucifixion of Christ (what would eventually be The Day the Revolution Began). As he prepared to write that book, tragedy struck as 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners and flew them into civilian targets on the Eastern seaboard of the US. Wright realized he needed to write a book on the problem of evil before he dealt with the cross. This thin (less than 170 page) volume Evil and the Justice of God is Wright’s contribution on the subject of evil and God.

Wright’s book is neither primarily a pastoral nor a philosophical reflection on the problem of evil. It deals with the problem primarily from a cultural and biblical perspective. Wright speaks with such ease, you feel as though you’re sitting with a cup of tea in hand in his living room. This both warmly draws the reader in, but can at times give one the sense that the material is ad hoc and is not as well thought out as one would hope.

The encroachment of evil in the contemporary world has been a significant problem, and yet, Wright notes, it “seems to have taken many people, not least politicians and the media, by surprise.” This is because our cultural philosophy has no answer for evil. Wright identifies that cultural philosophy in one word: progress. What is new, no, what is next holds the highest value (look no further than our cultural worship of youth).

And yet, we should have learned that progress provided no real answers for our hardest questions. How, in light of Auschwitz, could we still be anchored by a philosophical mooring as weak as progress? Our answer has been to project evil outward: to the other, to society, to politics. But a culture of blame is no real solution.

Enter postmodernity, where cynicism reigns: “nothing will get better and there’s nothing you can do about it.” But that is no solution. Worse still, “postmodernity allows for no redemption. There is no way out, no chance of repentance and restoration, no way back to the solid ground of truth from the quicksands of deconstruction.”

Modernism did away with Satan and evil, but the burden of proof lies on the modernist to defend their tenuous construal of reality.

What does the God of the Bible do about evil? Wright takes us on a biblical tour to answer that question.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.      Bob Newhart’s Six Minute Tutorial for Effective Counseling: This is an all-time family favorite, especially since my wife is a counselor. If you haven’t seen it, you’ve got to watch it. If you’ve already seen it, you can’t watch it too many times.

2.      More Than Mere Equality: Jonathan Leeman broaches the difficult topic of privilege, identity politics, and gospel peace. Leeman reflects the tension between justice and moral agency. On the one hand, “Biblical justice isn’t just a putting down of the oppressor. It is a lifting up of the oppressed and downtrodden.” On the other hand, "The bottom line here is: Identity politics, at its most careless, undermines moral agency."

3.      Disentangling Privilege: Andrew Wilson digs deeper into the topic of privilege and reflects on what he believes we should acknowledge is true about white privilege and what isn't.

4.      Check Your Privilege: Denny Burk also reflecting on Jonathan Leeman's piece says, "Obviously, these conclusions are squarely at odds with biblical teaching about guilt, justice, and reconciliation with God and with one another. And that is why we are going to have to give careful attention to the claims being made by proponents of identity politics."

5.      A Day in the Life of Americans: A mesmerizing infographic of how Americans spend their time during the day.

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