Category: Spiritual Growth

While I was prepar­ing for this week’s mes­sage I came across this para­graph which I don’t think is going to make it in (does­n’t fit the flow), but it was so good that I feel com­pelled to share it with you:

Dorothy Say­ers in her book Unpop­u­lar Opin­ions wrote:

Set­ting aside the scan­dal caused by His Mes­sian­ic claims and His rep­u­ta­tion as a polit­i­cal fire­brand, only two accu­sa­tions of per­son­al deprav­i­ty seem to have been brought against Jesus of Nazareth. First, that He was a Sab­bath-break­er. Sec­ond­ly, that He was “a glut­to­nous man and a winebib­ber, a friend of pub­li­cans and sin­ners” — or (to draw aside the veil of Eliz­a­bethan Eng­lish that makes it sound so much more respectable) that He ate too hearti­ly, drank too freely, and kept very dis­rep­utable com­pa­ny, includ­ing grafters of the low­est type and ladies who were no bet­ter than they should be. For nine­teen and a half cen­turies, the Chris­t­ian Church­es have laboured, not with­out suc­cess, to remove this unfor­tu­nate impres­sion made by their Lord and Mas­ter. They have hus­tled the Mag­dalens from the Com­mu­nion-table, found­ed Total Absti­nence Soci­eties in the name of Him who made the water wine, and added improve­ments of their own, such as var­i­ous bans and anath­e­mas upon danc­ing and the­atre-going. They have trans­ferred the Sab­bath from Sat­ur­day to Sun­day, and, feel­ing that the orig­i­nal com­mand­ment “Thou shalt not work” was rather half-heart­ed, have added to it the new com­mand­ment, “Thou shalt not play.”

So there.

Now that I look at it again it may make it in after all… come and find out!

By the way, this week we’re con­tin­u­ing our “Jesus Is Ask­ing You…” series of mes­sages with the piv­otal ques­tion Who Do You Say That I Am?

I just ran across a great web­site called Erase the Dark which builds a strong case against pornog­ra­phy.

If you ever need some sol­id research and argu­ments come here.

Also, if you ever play the ratio­nal­iza­tion game with your­self (I’m not real­ly hurt­ing any­one and this isn’t what Jesus was talk­ing about any­way) you should check out the site.

It’s quite good.

Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine just ran an arti­cle on the social Greek sys­tem (as opposed to the hon­ors Greek sys­tem) — Soror­i­ties and Fra­ter­ni­ties: Take Em or Leave Em?.

The Greek sys­tem isn’t very pop­u­lar here at Stan­ford, but if you’re con­sid­er­ing it you might want to read the arti­cle. It comes at the Greeks from a fair­ly pos­i­tive per­spec­tive: Fra­ter­ni­ty and soror­i­ty life has a rather noto­ri­ous rep­u­ta­tion and his­to­ry on many col­lege cam­pus­es, some good, most bad. They are rep­u­ta­tions dri­ven by the hor­ror of trag­ic head­lines and the laugh­able pranks of John Belushi in Ani­mal House. In fact, Greek life is often a tale of two lifestyles: one accept­able and one trag­i­cal­ly degen­er­a­tive.

P.S. Be sure to check out the read­ers’ com­ments at the bot­tom of the article–they’re real­ly inter­est­ing!

I just saw an arti­cle on Bound­less that seemed rel­e­vant: Friends and Proverbs.

I waved good­bye to my par­ents as they pulled their mini­van out of my dorm park­ing lot. Ner­vous yet excit­ed, I embarked on the chap­ter of life called col­lege. I was in a new domain — all on my own. Though the aca­d­e­m­ic chal­lenge I would encounter felt daunt­ing enough, my biggest fear was being alone. I won­dered how I would make friends.

If mak­ing friends at Stan­ford is one of your con­cerns, check out the arti­cle. It’s about two dif­fer­ent kinds of friend­ship and how to tell the dif­fer­ence between them.

Nathaniel recent­ly sent me this pho­to in an email attach­ment. I got a chuck­le out of it. You can see the full-sized ver­sion in our gallery.

In addi­tion, I just stum­bled across an arti­cle by one of my favorite authors on one of my favorite web­sites. It’s about doing well in col­lege (spir­i­tu­al­ly speak­ing). It’s writ­ten to pas­tors more than to stu­dents, but it’s still help­ful read­ing. It talks about twelve reaons col­lege stu­dents lose their faith and how to han­dle each of the twelve! Check out Off To College–Can We Keep Them? by phi­los­o­phy prof J. Budziszews­ki.

If you’re an incom­ing fresh­man, trans­fer stu­dent, or grad­u­ate student–welcome!

I just ran across an inter­est­ing arti­cle talk­ing about the rela­tion­ship between Chris­tians and col­lege sports, a rela­tion­ship which can be summed up in the phrase [Recent scan­dals] may lead the faith­ful to ask a new ques­tion: Should a Chris­t­ian stu­dent think twice before get­ting involved in high-pro­file col­lege sports like bas­ket­ball or foot­ball? What kind of val­ues will he or she learn in that set­ting?

Dur­ing the late nine­teenth and ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, this ques­tion would have been unthink­able. Why? Because col­lege sports was imbued with an ide­al called “mus­cu­lar Chris­tian­i­ty.”

This was the belief that phys­i­cal activ­i­ty and sports, espe­cial­ly team sports, devel­oped char­ac­ter, fos­tered patri­o­tism, and instilled virtues that would serve their participants—and their par­tic­i­pants’ God—well in lat­er life. In oth­er words, team games taught their own high eth­ic, and that eth­ic could and should be a Chris­t­ian one.

Read the whole thing and learn about the ori­gins of the YMCA, bas­ket­ball and the Olympics.

I’ve had a nag­ging thought for a while now, some­thing about how our soci­ety is begin­ning to view risk (or lack there­of) to be a cen­tral part of moral­i­ty (and how this is not a good thing). I’ve nev­er been able to artic­u­late it as well as I would like, which is why I was so pleased to run across this essay by Den­nis Prager: Would You Rather Your Teenag­er Smoke Or Cheat?

.

Here are his open­ing para­graphs, I encour­age you to read the whole thing: Decades of lec­tur­ing around Amer­i­ca and of speak­ing with par­ents on my radio show have led me to an incred­i­ble con­clu­sion: More Amer­i­can par­ents would be upset with their teenage chil­dren if they smoked a cig­a­rette than if they cheat­ed on a test.

How has this come about? This is, after all, an entire­ly new phe­nom­e­non. Almost no mem­ber of my gen­er­a­tion (those who became teenagers in the 1960s), let alone a mem­ber of any pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion, could ever have imag­ined that par­ents would be angri­er with their teenage child for smok­ing than for cheat­ing.

There has been a pro­found change in Amer­i­can val­ues. In a nut­shell, health has over­tak­en moral­i­ty. Or, if you pre­fer, health has become our moral­i­ty.

Read the whole essay.

Andrew found an inter­est­ing arti­cle called Too Smart To Be Dumb.

Here’s an excerpt:

Read­ing [the rel­e­vance of intel­li­gence] in a book review the oth­er day remind­ed me (for rea­sons you’ll soon under­stand) of a car acci­dent my wife and daugh­ter were lucky to walk away from three years ago. A 16-year-old dri­ving a new Lin­coln coupe hit them at 70 mph–twice the speed limit–after careen­ing off a hill­side. Lat­er that night the kid’s moth­er told me how shocked she was by the wit­ness reports of his reck­less dri­ving. “But he got 1550 on his SAT,” she cried.

“What do you do for a liv­ing?” I asked.

It was no sur­prise to hear that she’s a col­lege pro­fes­sor.

Like mil­lions of intel­lec­tu­al elites and wannabes, this woman pre­sumes an inher­ent con­nec­tion between intel­li­gence and good­ness, and between intel­li­gence and wis­dom, as though there exists some objec­tive domain of eth­i­cal­i­ty to which Men­sa mem­bers are auto­mat­i­cal­ly admit­ted.

The arti­cle is pri­mar­i­ly a polit­i­cal one, but it’s got a recur­ring theme that I found quite inter­est­ing: smart does­n’t imply moral. Read the arti­cle.

Stay­ing sex­u­al­ly pure in a pol­lut­ed world seems to be get­ting hard­er and hard­er. At least, that’s the impres­sion any­one speak­ing with Chris­t­ian col­lege stu­dents would get…

Turns out they’re right.

Then there’s the inter­sec­tion of biol­o­gy and cul­ture. Over the past 150 years, the aver­age for menarche—a wom­an’s first period—has dropped from near­ly sev­en­teen to twelve years of age with no signs of stop­ping. (Among African-Amer­i­cans in par­tic­u­lar, the fig­ure is clos­er to eleven!) His­tor­i­cal data for males is hard­er to come by but, with­out being too explic­it, Amer­i­can males, on aver­age, are “sex­u­al­ly func­tion­al” by twelve years of age. (Once again, the fig­ure is slight­ly low­er for African-Amer­i­cans.) At the same time the aver­age age for puber­ty and menar­che has been going down, the aver­age age for first mar­riage has been going up: from 22.8 for men and 20.3 for women in 1950 to 27 and 25 today. For the college-educated—the sta­tus to which most Amer­i­cans aspire, both per­son­al­ly and for their kids—the aver­age age is near­ly two years high­er. (Between 1970 and 1994, the per­cent­age of women aged thir­ty to thir­ty-four who had nev­er been mar­ried rose from 6 to 22 per­cent. For men, the fig­ures were 9 and 30 per­cent, respec­tive­ly.)

The bot­tom line of all these num­bers is that young Chris­tians are expect­ed to remain sex­u­al­ly con­ti­nent for a longer peri­od of time than prob­a­bly any gen­er­a­tion that has pre­ced­ed them. And they’re sup­posed to do this while liv­ing in the most sex­u­al­ly charged cul­ture ever seen.

Read the whole arti­cle at Break­point

You might be inter­est­ed to read the thoughts which prompt­ed Break­point’s arti­cle:
* There’s No Such Thing As Pre­mar­i­tal Sex launched it by claim­ing that once two peo­ple sleep togeth­er they’re mar­ried and seeks to sup­port his posi­tion from the Law of Moses.
* A Horse­less Car­riage rebutted the charge. She did an out­stand­ing job, and used a very per­sua­sive anal­o­gy: To cite the Exo­dus ref­er­ence requir­ing a man to make right his seduc­tion of a vir­gin (which, inci­den­tal­ly, falls in a long list of ways to make ret­ri­bu­tion when bad things hap­pen) as evi­dence that the act of sex, rather than a process of mar­riage and con­sum­ma­tion, made the two peo­ple mar­ried, makes about as much sense as argu­ing that a law requir­ing a thief to pay for the pie he has already con­sumed real­ly means that the pie was right­ful­ly and beau­ti­ful­ly his the moment the first bite crossed his lips. The author of the orig­i­nal arti­cle responds on the same page and clar­i­fies his posi­tion (and even makes a few inter­est­ing claims along the way).

All worth read­ing and reflect­ing on.

I’ve men­tioned Covenant Eyes and X3watch before.

Now NetAc­count­abil­i­ty joins the pack of online account­abil­i­ty pro­grams.

If you’re strug­gling with pornog­ra­phy online, you should check it out. It’s not a filter–it just records where you go and reports it to some­one you choose. It’s a very slick solu­tion.