Psalm 23 Expanded

Yahweh, the Ever-Always Existent One, is my Shepherd, Feeding, guiding, and shielding me. Because He has provided all things for me, I never lack anything. He causes me, by His voice, to lie down, and be restful, in green tender-grass pastures. He leads, tends, and feeds me beside restful, looking-glass, waters. He turns back my life, to be what it was meant to be, by restoring my soul. He leads and places me in the highway-like paths of righteousness, for His own Name’s sake, preserving His own integrity and reputation. Yes, even though I casually and leisurely stroll through the low places of death’s empty threat, there is not so much as a hint of fear in me. I will not fear, for You are with me. Your scepter of authority, discipline, & protection, and Your staff of support cause me to give forth sighs of one who has been relieved of pressure. You set up, and prepare, an elegant dining table before me, so that I eat in style, right in front of my enemies. You bathe my head in richness, so that I cannot contain what You give me, and so my already-full-cup spills over. Surely, (there is no questioning it) goodness and mercy shall pursue me, without ever tiring out or giving up, every moment of my existence. And I will stop, sit still, and abide in the presence and household of Yahweh, the Ever-Always Existent One, throughout all eternity!

On the Radicals’ Takeover of Higher Education --by Gene Veith

 

When the presidents of three Ivy League universities were asked whether calls for genocide of the Jews would violate each university’s code of conduct, they couldn’t bring themselves to say that it would.

Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, said, “We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.”   Which is grimly hilarious, given that Harvard is ranked last in the College Free Speech Rankings, as determined by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

In the academic world, if a professor or student or campus speaker criticizes transgenderism, the LGBTQ agenda, abortion, critical race theory, or any other facet of woke ideology, he or she must be fired, cancelled, or otherwise punished because the remark could be “triggering,” making someone in the group being criticized feel unsafe.

Apparently, it didn’t occur to the presidents that chants of “gas the Jews” might be triggering to Jews.

The open support of Islamic terrorism and the rebirth of old-school anti-semitism–which goes beyond opposition to “Zionism” to assaults on Jewish students–is at least waking up the public to how bad things have gotten on university campuses.

John M. Ellis, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California Santa Cruz, has been a long-time leader in the National Association of Scholars and other initiatives to oppose the radicalization of academia.  He is the author of  The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done (2020).

He has published a compelling op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall) entitled Higher Ed Has Become a Threat to America, with the deck “Our corrupt, radical universities feed every scourge from censorship and crime to antisemitism.”  Here is how it begins:

America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, children poorly educated while sexualized and politicized against parental opposition, unconstitutional censorship, a press that does government PR rather than oversight, our institutions and corporations debased in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”—and more. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism.

Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education by radical political activists.

Universities, Ellis points out, have a monopoly on training and credentialing for all of the professions.  As a result, campus radicalism is manifesting itself in the fields of education, journalism, law, medicine, social work, and–I would add–public policy, the arts, and business.  This has consequences in the dysfunctions we are struggling with today:

Children’s test scores have plummeted because college education departments train teachers to prioritize “social justice” over education. Censorship started with one-party campuses shutting down conservative voices. The coddling of criminals originated with academia’s devotion to Michel Foucault’s idea that criminals are victims, not victimizers. The drive to separate children from their parents begins in longstanding campus contempt for the suburban home and nuclear family. Radicalized college journalism departments promote far-left advocacy. Open borders reflect pro-globalism and anti-nation state sentiment among radical professors. DEI started as a campus ruse to justify racial quotas. Campus antisemitism grew out of ideologies like “anticolonialism,” “anticapitalism” and “intersectionality.”

Let me give you a couple of other examples of what is happening in academia.

What’s happened to the field of sociology

Wayne State sociologist Jukka Savolainen has written an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal entitled Florida’s Shunning of Sociology Should Be a Wake-Up Call, with the deck, “The field has morphed from scientific study into academic advocacy for left-wing causes.” In the course of his discussion of Florida’s DeSantis-inspired proposal to remove Intro to Sociology as a course that counts for the state universities’ general education requirement, he laments what has happened to his profession.

“Through the decades,” he writes, “I have watched my discipline morph from a scientific study of social reality into academic advocacy for left-wing causes.”  Other colleagues in the field, he says, agree with him.  He cites Notre Dame sociologist of religion Christian Smith, who has written a book, The Sacred Project of American Sociology (2014), on how seemingly secularist social scientists have turned their discipline into a religion:

Mr. Smith is disappointed that undergraduate sociology textbooks, rather than disseminate scientific findings, “function as recruiting tools and re-socialization manuals” to turn students into radical activists. He is equally disappointed with the discipline’s failure to come clean about its obvious political commitments. Publicly, the American Sociological Association describes sociology as a “scientific study of social life” interested in the “causes and consequences of human behavior.” Internally, ASA embraces and promotes social-change activism.

Each year, the association’s president chooses a theme for its annual meeting. Next year’s theme is brazenly political: “Intersectional Solidarities: Building Communities of Hope, Justice, and Joy.” The ASA sums it up as follows: “The 2024 theme emphasizes sociology as a form of liberatory praxis: an effort to not only understand structural inequities, but to intervene in socio-political struggles.”

Race-based Hiring

Anita Kinney and Anthony Pericolo of the City Journal have uncovered how the University of Washington has been evading civil rights laws in its hiring practices.  In their article No White Faculty Allowed, they cite a hiring manual used by the Psychology Department, which has only hired “BIPOC” (black, indigenous, people of color) candidates for their last six positions and which vetoed the hiring committee’s most recent choice because he was white.

The manual shows how institutions are evading the laws against racial discrimination, not only against whites but also against other disfavored racial groups, namely, Asians and Middle Easterners:

First, the handbook advises recruiters to “prepare for success” by developing a strategy for how to hire based on race. To guarantee nonwhite candidates, recruiters should reach out directly to underrepresented minority (URM) candidates. The department’s search committee “sent over 100 personal emails, primarily to URM researchers.” The handbook carefully ranks favored minority groups, specifically “Black/African American, Latinx/Hispanic, or American Indian/Indigenous,” above less preferred ones, specifically “Asian American or Middle Eastern American.”

Next, the handbook recommends drafting job descriptions that match the resumes of specific minority candidates. That way, the applications will perfectly suit the job posting. It directs institutions to “[v]isualize your ideal candidates and work backwards from there to word your advertisement. . . .

A hiring committee should also refrain from evaluating candidate competence. Committees should “[d]econstruct how evaluating candidates” on their productivity, verbal communication skills, or leadership “may advantage privileged groups over underrepresented groups.”

The handbook offers another clue as to how the department had so much success in hiring minority candidates: if a URM candidate was rejected, the department simply reversed the rejection. Any “dropped URM candidates were automatically given a second look before moving on.”

To guarantee that minority status receives appropriate weight, the manual also suggests “placing contributions to diversity high on the list” or even making that “a criterion candidates must pass to make it to the second round”—for example, by “contributing to diversity” or “serving as a role model for URM students.” Since white candidates cannot “contribute to diversity” or “serve as role models” for students of different races, this guarantees that representatives of the correct races will get hired.

If, somehow, a committee still managed to hire white people or the wrong minorities, the manual suggests developing an audit process to identify criteria where “white candidates, male candidates . . . receive higher scores,” so that those criteria can be removed. Particularly, rigorous scientific practices like “publicly posting data, hypotheses and materials to guard against accusations of selectively reporting results or falsifying data” tends to “produce biased results”—namely, the hiring of white men. This was easily solved by “subsequently dropp[ing]” scientific rigor from “evaluation criterion” of candidate searches.

My Thoughts

I myself am an academic, recently retired from a long career in higher education.  I taught mostly, though not exclusively, in Christian colleges, which gave me something of a haven from all of this (though Christian colleges are not immune from the professional peer pressure and require an intentional push back against it).  I am dismayed about what has been happening to my profession and my discipline, the field of English Literature, which has become a hotbed of leftwing “critical theory.”

I can say, though, that there are lots of genuine scholars, legitimate researchers, and good teachers at most colleges and universities today, who are likewise appalled at the anti-intellectualism and the politicization of today’s higher education.  Just as there were dissidents in the Soviet universities which were required to teach according to the tenets of Marxist-Leninism, there are dissidents in American universities, the difference being that Stalin’s police state enforced ideological conformity in Russia, whereas American universities are enforcing ideological conformity on themselves.

Many of those dissidents today on college faculties, though, are keeping their heads down and their office doors closed, being careful not to Tweet anything and to watch what they say, while continuing to do good work in their specialized fields.  There are others, though–like John Ellis, Jukka Savolainen, Christian Smith, the scholars I quote here–who are speaking up.

The growing reaction of donors, state governments, parents, students, and employers to these realizations should add to their number and  might eventually put higher education back together again.

No Room For Timid Pietism

 Some people seem to have the idea that if we ask God for things, if we petition God, that’s somehow self-centered or unspiritual. Only if we’re worshiping God or telling him how great he is are we truly glorifying him. This is a very mistaken, and possibly even a spiritually fatal, idea. When we ask God for things, we are not somehow less spiritual than when we tell God how great he is. Answered prayer is greatly more Godhonoring than unanswered prayer. --P. Andrew Sandlin

Will we be in Heaven or on earth? The answer is yes.

 When we rebelled against Him, there was a great rupture. Heaven was now distant, and we were left down here, under the sun, shepherding wind. Where shall we be after the resurrection? After the last trump has sounded, and after all the dead are raised, and after the sea gives up her dead, where will we all be? Where will we live? Will we be in Heaven or on earth? The answer is yes. Everything will be united again. Christ came in order to heal the rupture, and to heal it completely. --D. Wilson

FREE SPEECH!

 Any country that does not allow a free discussion of the process by which its leaders are elected is not a democracy, by definition. --Tucker Carlson

Following Christ as the Church Militant

 

Following Christ as the Church Militant --By Joe Boot 

An urgent warning to the clerics and parishioners

Christian thinking must be concerned with actually following the Christ of Scripture and having His Word dwell and abide in us by His Spirit. Submitting oneself to being a humble follower doesn’t come easily to anyone – especially cultural leaders, thinkers and apparently bishops. This was evident in the recent diabolical and self-immolating ruling of the bishops in the Church of England to formally bless same-sex relationships in the churches, all in the name of the love of Jesus. The human inclination is always toward autonomy, preferring to live the illusion that we can ‘legislate’ for ourselves; to be a king without a country in the rootless despair of defiance is the preference of our rebellious age. 

Being a professing Christian in the church does not remove the temptation or inclination to strike out alone, to follow our own desires or those of our culture, to live by our own priorities and to set aside the awesome and all-consuming call to be a disciple of Christ; to come and die in order to truly live.  Kneeling as a living sacrifice sounds incredibly painful and involves a transformation of the heart which implies the pain and suffering of rejection by a world conformed, in the final analysis, to a very different spirit. But the divine midwife insists this is the only way. We must be reborn, transformed, and given a new heart, a new mind.

As Christians we may claim to follow Christ, but the lifelong challenge in developing a truly Christian mindset requires regularly asking ourselves if we have followed Him far enough? Have we been to Jordan and seen the dove descending, but hung back from the mountain to avoid His exposition of the law and radical insistence that only those who teach that law are great in the Kingdom? Have we fallen asleep in pious satisfaction at the gates of Gethsemane, or lingered from a safe distance at Golgotha, never making it to the slopes of Olivet or to the upper room in Jerusalem with the dancing flames of fire?  Is it possible that we are not yet Christian enough?  It is all too easy to follow Christ only as far as is convenient, till the tarrying is just too tiring. If we only follow Christ part way, then we are uninvolved in key aspects of the drama and miss the significance of God’s full act in history.

The entire work of Christ in all His offices must become contemporaneous with us if we would truly be transformed by the renewing of our minds. It is not sufficient to appreciate Christ washing Simon Peter’s feet at the last supper as a model of service if we refuse to see Him, let alone join Him, where the bloodied Stephen saw Him – exalted in heavenly places, standing up from his seat of total authority at God’s right hand.  Unambiguously, we must see Him as priest on the road to Calvary, but we must also recognize Him on the footpath to Emmaus as resurrected Lord – the gardener of creation among Arimathea’s roses – if we are to truly follow Christ and know the renewal of our minds.

In a hostile context, the temptation is to follow Him just as far as culture permits. When the storm rises, dread grips us and we hear His call to step out of the boat and walk upon the Word – despite the wind and waves of the world’s antagonism – we suddenly become hard of hearing. And if we will not hear that Word over the inimical clamour of idolatry, we certainly cannot then speak it.  If our cultural moment is allowed to determine how far we follow Christ, then we cannot follow Him at all.  We may perhaps hear Hosanna’s from a distance, but we won’t be found stammering with the doubter, ‘My Lord and my God!’  We may even be permitted by our age to stand near the wooden cross of a brave martyr, but not on the mountain of ascension with the ruler of the kings of the earth.

The sad end of hearing and heeding only the word our culture will permit is first an unwillingness, then a tragic inability, to speak the whole counsel of God as faithful prophets. As priest and prophet Christ was hated, knew the world’s enmity, and warned that the spirit at work in the children of disobedience would naturally hate His followers also. But we cannot follow our Prophet nor share in His sufferings if we refuse to prophesy. Many contemporary priests would rather predict with Balaam to preserve their living than stand with Elijah against Baal. It is certain an ass has spoken with more wisdom in the annals of prophetic utterance than many English bishops – hirelings who would flog the meekest of God’s prophets if they could for hindering their progress in vexing the people of God. Like powdered-wigged courtiers fighting over who will fetch the king’s chamber pot, much of the church simply courts the culture – ingratiating themselves with the influential, the powerful, the professors, even senior clergy who have whored themselves to the spirit of the world.

The moment that God’s people call a truce and reach a settlement with the spirit of the world, the mindset of the age, is the moment they abolish the Christian mind and overturn true Christianity. The kingdom of God is indeed in this world, but not of it; it is surely present here, but it is not from here – its power, authority and mandate derive from a transcendent source. In history, the church is always the church militant, not the church triumphant. The struggle will continue over our graves till the King comes who will open all graves. We are called to victory, not to peaceful collaboration.

When the church says ‘peace, peace’ when there is no peace and signs a treaty with a rebel world, it pretends to be the church triumphant, and pretends that the struggle against lawlessness and spiritual darkness is complete – but before the consummation of Christ. It is a tragic irony that those who preach righteousness and hope for history through following Christ to the uttermost, bringing them into direct conflict with the world on the frontlines of battle, are charged with ‘triumphalism,’ whilst popular collaborators who claim neutrality with the world, making a compact of surrender or privatization to the applause of culture are thought pious and realistic. In reality, they are triumphalist – seeking to immanentize a false eschaton by denaturing the faith, abstracting it from the affairs of daily life and coating what remains in honey so as to avoid any bitter taste in society’s mouth – for a church no longer at war is a church triumphant.

https://www.ezrainstitute.com/resource-library/blog-entries/following-christ-as-the-church-militant/

 

 

Resurrecting Liberalism

–by P. Andrew Sandlin

Modern conservatives know that they're actually old-time liberals and should reclaim the term.

Liberalism, the Roots

Liberalism is a dirty word to many conservatives — Leftists, too. The latter now prefer to be called “progressives.” This is welcome news for thoughtful modern conservatives, who know that they themselves are actually old-time liberals, and we should reclaim the term.

Liberalism is the application of the Protestant Reformation to politics, and wedded to the conservative wing of the Enlightenment. Luther and Calvin’s recovery of the biblical truth of the individual’s responsibility before God unencumbered by the interposition of the medieval church soon found a parallel in the individual citizen’s liberty from an oppressive state and hereditary monarchies, strangling economic guilds, and suffocating clannishness. Individuals were rightly obligated to state, family, church, and business, but they were largely set free to follow the dictates of their own conscience, and gain the benefits, or suffer the consequences.

Spheres of Liberty (Liberalism)

Three main spheres of that liberty are the religious, political, and economic. Religious liberty means the liberty to worship God (or not worship him at all) according to the dictates of one’s conscience. It means there is no tax-financed national church into which one is born coterminous with the state. It means not that the state is religiously neutral (an impossibility) but that the state doesn’t get involved in church disputes or privilege a single denomination. The state enforces the moral law of God appropriate to its sphere and leaves the rest of Christian practice (or no practice) to citizens. This moral law as it relates to civil legislation is narrow — basically protecting life, liberty, and property, in language popular at the War for Independence. The state is not designed to make people good Christians. That’s the job of the church and family.

Next comes political liberty. Liberalism reversed the traditional priority of politics: the individual exists for the purpose of the nation or state. For liberalism, by contrast, the state exists for the purpose of the individual, to protect his liberty. “Governments are instituted among Men,” the Declaration of independence says, to “secure … Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” If the state doesn’t protect these God-given rights, there’s no reason for its existence. This was a breathtaking philosophical shift in the history of politics, but it has given the West the greatest measure of freedom in world history.

Finally, consider economic liberty. Liberalism observed how the so-called divine right of kings and intergenerational aristocratic rights had imperiled private property for much of human history. The strong owned property and created laws to forbid the competition of honest workers and investors. Liberals knew that property was an extension of the person. What we own is part of who we are. Individuals must therefore be free to work and get and barter their own property. Because it is theirs, and not another’s, they will treat it more carefully and respectfully. When liberalism sparked widespread economic liberty, the West over time developed such wealthy societies that were seen nowhere previously.

Liberalism, inspired by Reformational ideas, gave us a free, peaceful, prosperous, world. This is the world into which those of my age and older were born. We are its beneficiaries.

Liberty (Liberalism) Under Assault

It is now under withering assault, first by Leftists and, sadly, also by some misguided conservatives.  

Leftists are at heart utopians.1 They (1) believe they know what the perfect society should be (egalitarian: no sexual, religious or economic differences); they (2) are confident it can be realized; and they (3) work to make it happen. But this society isn’t compatible with liberty. When people are free to act as they want, even — perhaps especially  — within the realm of God’s moral law, they won’t seek utopian egalitarianism. Therefore, they must not be granted the liberty to act. Political authority should be in the hands of those who have society’s best interests at heart — Leftists, of course. This is an updated form of Marxism called Cultural Marxism. Not just economics but all of life must be equalized by the enforced power of the state. This is why all modern Leftists must be statists.

But, increasingly, not only Leftists. Some social conservatives, correctly alarmed at the moral decadence of our society — abortion, homosexual “marriage,” pornification, transgenderism, transhumanism, for example — incorrectly blame liberalism, that is, they blame liberty. Their attitude is: “If there were less liberty, there would be more virtue.” They want a society of politically enforced virtue; they want to enforce the virtue. In this, they’re no different from Robespierre, Lenin, and Pol Pot. They only disagree on how to define the virtue.  These conservatives are sometimes called “integralists” (if Roman Catholic) or “post-liberals.” Liberalism, they assert, has failed. What they really mean is: liberty has failed. They want the power of political coercion to correct this problem.2

They fail to understand that liberty is itself a virtue.3 A free society can become an unvirtuous society, as ours has, but this is due to men’s depraved heats, not to liberty. They have failed in the culture wars — abortion was nationally legalized for nearly 50 years, though thank God, removed last week from judicial to legislative jurisdiction; homosexual “marriage” has been nationally legalized; and the rights of children to try to change their “gender” have been solidified. But these were not first Leftist political victories. They were Leftist cultural victories later easily codified in politics.

Resurrecting Liberty (Liberalism)
To resurrect liberty, therefore, we must work to restore a godly culture. That culture will eventually work its way into politics, not vice versa. There is no more pressing character quality in reviving liberty than individual responsibility. Anti-liberal thinking stresses group or identitarian dynamics: your meaning in life is rooted in your sex, or your race, or your economic status. You are a captive to that identity, and that identity excuses your privations and failures. If you’re a woman, “the patriarchy” has held you back. If you’re black, “white supremacy” has oppressed you. If you’re homosexual, a “heteronormative” society has prevented the exercise of your full potential.4

In the Bible, we’re all created in God’s image and personally responsible for our actions. We may not enlist the coercive state to redress our grievances of being a woman or a Hispanic or a lower-middle class citizen. We must recognize that while all of us have confronted hard, unforeseen circumstances, we should take it as a rule that we are today where our own decisions have brought us. We are not victims. We should have the liberty to decide — and live with the consequences of our decisions.

Liberalism is the political philosophy that allows us to make and live with our decisions. The state will not save us. It will protect our life, liberty, and property. It will not protect us from our bad decisions, from ourselves. Liberalism takes seriously man created in God’s image and therefore free within God’s cosmic order. Man’s primal calling is to exercise dominion over the creation within that order (Genesis 1:27–30). No political system has been better than liberalism at providing man the freedom to fulfill that task.

To resurrect individual responsibility under God’s authority is to resurrect liberalism.

1 Thomas Molnar Utopia, the Perennial Heresy (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967).

2 For a definitive refutation of the charges against liberalism, see Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1993).

3 Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1996).

4 Of course, male and female and black and white are rooted in our created being. Homosexuality is a perverse invention.