I wasn't planning to write this.  When I heard about Trump's brave new guidance for prayer in schools, I tried to just ignore it and get on with my life.  I figured that I had gotten enough of my friends mad at me for the time being and that I should just let this particular opportunity slide on by.  However, I saw so many of my friends posting about how wonderful Trump was for issuing these new guidelines that I finally decided to actually read the guidelines for myself and see what all the fuss was about.

Dear Bro. Charles,
 
By now, you have almost certainly heard about the contention between Pastor Dan and the deacons of First Baptist Church.  In fact, it would be nigh impossible for you to have missed it.  Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation being spread by both sides of the conflict, and I wanted to write you to ensure that you received an accurate account of the proceedings up to this time.  Of course, I won’t be able to go into a lot of detail, but I hope that this overview will help you to sort out truth from fiction among all the conflicting reports that you have read.

My most memorable game as a coach did not come from a win but rather from a loss.  I had been hired earlier that year to coach the JV Basketball team for a small Christian school in North Carolina.  The school’s varsity team had repeatedly finished first or second for several years in a row thanks in large part to a varsity coach who had been hired soon after his conversion because of his record for winning.  In fact, the varsity team’s record was one of the major recruitment tools that the school used to grow their high school program.  Their JV team, however, was not doing as well, and they hired me to teach their young players the fundamentals of the game and prepare them to compete on the varsity level.

I recently had the opportunity to listen to a debate between Mark Hall and Steven Green on the topic of the Christian foundation of America.  Hall has written a book defending the idea that America had a Christian foundation, and Green has written a book in defense of the opposite view.  I obviously agree with Hall, but I thought that he could have done a better job of refuting some of Green’s claims (and he probably does so in his book).  Since I was taking notes anyway, I thought that I would share a few of my objections to Green’s claims.

Modern accounts of the philosophical underpinnings of the American Revolution often attribute the concept of popular sovereignty to men such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau with Locke being the one most often praised as the source of the American ideal of a government of the people, by the people and for the people.  To make this attribution, however, modern scholarship has had to ignore or, perhaps, forget the previously held view that the notion of popular sovereignty can be traced to the government of ancient Israel as recorded in the pages of the Bible.  This in-depth study is an attempt to correct that error.

The conclusion to my book Hidden Facts of the Founding Era contains a list of 49 correlations between the Bible and the Constitution, and I thought it would be good to share it again here.  The book is a refutation of Chris Pinto's popular video The Hidden Faith of the Founding Fathers, and it is written for a homeschool audience.  You can read the conclusion here, and of course, the book is available on Amazon.

I was recently challenged with a question about the Bible and immigration, and to answer the challenge, I looked up every occurrence of the words “stranger,” “foreigner,” and “alien” in the Bible.  The resulting list was fascinating to read, and in doing so, I discovered the following seven principles about immigration that are taught in Scripture.

Earlier this week, John Zmirak and Kelly Kullberg published an article on The Stream in which they claimed to present “9 Things Jesus Might Do About Immigration.”  A friend of mine sent me the article and asked for my thoughts, so here is a point by point response to each of the ridiculous claims made in that article:

With all the filth that's allowed in so-called family movies today, it can be hard to find movies that a Christian family can safely enjoy.  Fortunately, there are still a lot of clean movies available if you know what to look for, and that's where the Clean Movie List comes in.  Click on a title to go to that film's Amazon page, and you can start building your library of actual family movies right now.

Disclaimer: I watched many of these movies on VHS, and they were clean in that format.  Unfortunately, a few of the DVD releases of these classic movies have put back in the cursing that was edited out of the VHS version.  I've tried to avoid listing movies to which this has happened, but I may have overlooked a few.

I have many Catholic friends, and from time to time, one of them will attempt to persuade me that the books of the Apocrypha are just as much Scripture as the Old and New Testaments.  After studying the Apocrypha itself, I've developed the response of pointing out that even according to the Catholic church's own criteria, the Apocrypha does not make the cut.