Parental Concerns of Parennts Today
Tuesday, January 31, 2023
Friday, January 27, 2023
Wednesday, January 25, 2023
The Manic Methods of the Left - VDH
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
For all Joe Biden’s talk about “semi-fascist” and “un-American,” “ultra-MAGA” Republicans, it is the Democratic Party that has far more radically changed. It is descended into a woke, neo-socialist, radically green party. And it is committed, as Barack Obama once promised, to fundamentally transforming America. How it proceeds with that agenda is now as entirely predictable as it is creepy.
etc....
Wednesday, January 18, 2023
The Trouble with Parables - Ten Minute Bible
Little Bit of Greek |
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"Jesus spoke all these things to the crowd in parables; he did not say anything to them without using a parable."
Last fall, Keith and I decided to teach a Bible study together. A priority was to pick a topic that was straightforward and easily organizable. Coordinating co-teaching is complicated, we wanted our subject matter to be simple.
Keith suggested Jesus's parables.......which, I now know, are the opposite of simple and straightforward.
Jesus's parables are SO hard to teach! First of all, experts are all over the place on what each parable means, so it's tough to figure out a starting place for your own study. Secondly, they are intentionally confusing. (Seriously!)
Parables are stories about the world designed to make you think (then rethink!). They don't fit neatly into systems because they're offering commentary on what Jesus is doing in the Kingdom of God-- which is a bit outside our human ability to comprehend.
Parables present a whole new way of seeing the world. They don’t answer the questions we bring to God, they tell us what we don't even know we need to know about how God and his creation work!
So how should you read this portion of the Bible? Remember three important things:
1. Jesus's parables further his mission to bring his kingdom. These confusing stories were the means by which Jesus ushered in his kingdom. They weren't illustrating abstract principles, they communicated God's heart to a waiting world, changing listeners' hearts in the process.
So instead of reading a parable asking "How does this apply to me?", start by investigating what the parable reveals about Jesus and his kingdom. This revelation will for sure have implications for you, but you're downstream from the story's main point.
2. Jesus's parables were delivered at a specific time and place. If Jesus had been born in 20th-century New York City, he'd surely have talked less about agriculture and more about...traffic? tourists? light pollution? (Idk, I'm from Missouri. I like the farm stories!
This means that to read the parables well, we need to understand the historical context and the original audience. Notice their recorded responses, interpretations, and follow-up questions. Resist the temptation to map your values and expectations onto the original audience’s experience.
3. Jesus's parables demand a response. By choosing to present info about the Kingdom of God as open-ended stories, Jesus invites his listener to engage with him and determine for themselves where they stand. When you read the parables, notice the effect they're having (on you and on the original hearers). Is it reminding, provoking, refining, confronting, disturbing?
When Jesus describes the kingdom, he makes pretty extraordinary claims→ positioning himself as the one who forgives sin and judges right from wrong, upsetting assumptions, challenging the status quo. For people who are really listening, a neutral response is not an option. Either they hear, believe, and their whole life changes. Or they walk away in denial.
The question stands. There's no middle ground when it comes to God's Kingdom. So, what do you say?
No neutral response doesn't mean 100% certainty! On Monday's episode, Keith discusses the role that doubt plays in the Christian faith: |
). But Jesus was in first-century Palestine trying to meet his listeners where they were. Though they still didn't always know what he was talking about, we have to do even more legwork than they did to understand. Sunday, January 8, 2023
The Coup We Never Knew -VDH
The Coup We Never Knew
Did someone or something seize control of the United States?
What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?
Since when did money not have to be paid back? Who insisted that the more dollars the federal government printed, the more prosperity would follow? When did America embrace zero interest? Why do we believe $30 trillion in debt is no big deal?
When did clean-burning, cheap, and abundant natural gas become the equivalent to dirty coal? How did prized natural gas that had granted America’s wishes of energy self-sufficiency, reduced pollution, and inexpensive electricity become almost overnight a pariah fuel whose extraction was a war against nature? Which lawmakers, which laws, which votes of the people declared natural gas development and pipelines near criminal?
Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings? How then with impunity did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas—furious over a court decision on abortion? How could these mobs so easily throng our justices’ homes, with placards declaring “Off with their d—s”?
Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth? And on whose orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did not like and writers whom it feared?
How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a phone call? Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union address on national television? Of barring congressional members from serving on their assigned congressional committees?
When did we assume the FBI had the right to subvert the campaign of a candidate it disliked? Was it legal suddenly for one presidential candidate to hire a foreign ex-spy to subvert the campaign of her rival?
Was some state or federal law passed that allowed biological males to compete in female sports? Did Congress enact such a law? Did the Supreme Court guarantee that biological male students could shower in gym locker rooms with biological women? Were women ever asked to redefine the very sports they had championed?
When did the government pass a law depriving Americans of their freedom during a pandemic? In America can health officials simply cancel rental contracts or declare loan payments in suspension? How could it become illegal for mom-and-pop stores to sell flowers or shoes during a quarantine but not so for Walmart or Target?
Since when did the people decide that 70 percent of voters would not cast their ballots on Election Day? Was this revolutionary change the subject of a national debate, a heated congressional session, or the votes of dozens of state legislatures?
What happened to Election Night returns? Did the fact that Americans created more electronic ballots and computerized tallies make it take so much longer to tabulate the votes?
When did the nation abruptly decide that theft is not a crime, assault not a felony? How can thieves walk out with bags of stolen goods, without the wrath of angry shoppers, much less fear of the law?
Was there ever a national debate about the terrified flight from Afghanistan? Who planned it and why?
What happened to the once trusted FBI? Why almost overnight did its directors decide to mislead Congress, to deceive judges with concocted tales from fake dossiers and with doctored writs? Did Congress pass a law that our federal leaders in the FBI or CIA could lie with impunity under oath?
Who redefined our military and with whose consent? Who proclaimed that our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could call his Chinese Communist counterpart to warn him that America’s president was supposedly unstable? Was it always true that retired generals routinely libeled their commander-in-chief as a near Nazi, a Mussolini, an adherent of the tools of Auschwitz?
Were Americans ever asked whether their universities could discriminate against their sons and daughters based on their race? How did it become physically dangerous to speak the truth on a campus? Whose idea was it to reboot racial segregation and bias as “theme houses,” “safe spaces,” and “diversity”? How did that happen in America?
How did a virus cancel the Constitution? Did the lockdowns rob of us of our sanity? Or was it the woke hysteria that ignited our collective madness?
We are beginning to wake up from a nightmare to a country we no longer recognize, and from a coup we never knew
Tuesday, January 3, 2023
Monday, January 2, 2023
The incredible weirdness of the Ray Epps saga
The incredible weirdness of the Ray Epps saga
Ray Epps is a name that keeps cropping up in connection with January 6. There are myriad videos of him urging people to go into the Capitol. Now, it turns out that, on January 6, 2021, he sent a text to a family member boasting, “I also orchestrated it [the entry into the Capitol].” By rights, according to the standards the Democrats have set since January 6, Epps ought to be sitting in a D.C. jail without bail or a trial date like the rest of the January 6 defendants. Except that he isn’t. What gives?
I won’t rehash the whole narrative of Ray Epp’s presence in Washington, D.C., on January 5 and 6, 2021. The Revolver did a good job of that, along with videos showing not just Epps in action but also showing carefully disguised people (unlike all the naïve Trump supporters on the scene) systematically and deliberately removing all fencing and signage that would have warned ordinary citizens that they were on land that carried heavy trespassing penalties.
The videos of Ray Epps, a tall, gray-haired man urging people to the Capitol, that are posted at The Revolver will suffice to show that Epp’s behavior was open and perfectly met the Democrats’ own description of what constitutes an “insurrection.” (I’m not agreeing with their definition, I’m just saying that Epps meets it.)
What’s truly bizarre is affirmative disinterest that the Democrats and the FBI (but I repeat myself) are showing in Epps. And by “affirmative,” I meant that, despite the FBI having him on its radar, it erased him entirely from consideration, while the January 6 Committee called him a good guy. From the Revolver:
As we explained in detail in our previous report, the FBI originally put Ray Epps’s face on its Capitol Violence “Most Wanted List” on January 8, 2021, just two days after 1/6. They offered a cash reward for information leading to his arrest. In fact, rank-and-file FBI agents initially deemed Epps’s role as an apparent riot organizer so important that they named him Suspect #16—one of the first 20 high-profile FBI targets in a database now packed with more than 500 suspects.
Then, six months later on June 30, 2021, both Revolver News and The New York Times published inconvenient stories that encouraged a more aggressive interrogation of the “Ray Epps third rail,” leading reasonable people to wonder why this publicly identified man on the Most Wanted List still had no charges filed against him.
The FBI responded to these important media stories the very next day. But their response was to quietly purge all online Ray Epps files from their website, then switch to a posture of “What? Who? Ray Epps? Never heard of him.”
Then there was Adam Kinzinger’s January 2022 Tweet essentially saying Epps was a good guy:
Well, that’s strange. Stranger yet is what emerged a couple of days ago when Ray Epp’s testimony before the House January 6 Committee was finally made public. It turned out that, on January 6, he boasted to his nephew that he “orchestrated” the Capitol riot:
Despite that tweet and the videos, Epps told the Committee that he had no idea that anyone was breaking into the Capitol, despite being caught on video urging people to do so the day before:
“At that point, I didn’t know that they were breaking into the Capitol,” Epps told Congressional investigators, adding “I didn’t know anybody was in the Capitol. ... I was on my way back to the hotel room.”
But the night before, Epps was seen going around to various groups of Trump supporters, telling them they need to storm the capitol.
In addition, we now know that, in February 2021, Epps had told the FBI he trespassed on Capitol grounds and admitted that he told people to go to the Capitol and try to enter it. (There’s much more here about Epps’s behavior.)
I’m not accusing Epps of any wrongdoing. I’m not familiar with federal laws about urging others to trespass on federal property, about doing the trespassing oneself, or about insurrection. I strongly believe that the Democrats are misusing whatever laws do exist to persecute political enemies and to make it clear to conservatives that they are at risk if they exercise their First Amendment rights.
However, I am accusing both the FBI and the January 6 Committee of very bizarre and suspicious decisions regarding Ray Epps. I sincerely hope that the incoming House will investigate why those Democrat-controlled institutions gave Epps a kid-glove treatment they denied to every other Trump supporter they caught in their extremely wide net.
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