The Bruised Reed in the Dark, Part 4: What Remains When Strength Fails I ended the last part by saying that depression, like any severe trial, is often God’s holy ground. Not because depression itself is holy. There is nothing sacred about a mind becoming ill or a human being suffering beneath a weight he…
The Bruised Reed in the Dark, Part 3: No Shelter for the Weary “The spirit of a man will sustain him in sickness, but who can bear a broken spirit?” (Proverbs 18:14) Scripture recognizes the distinction. A man may endure bodily pain, loss, exhaustion, and hardship so long as some inward strength remains to carry…
The Bruised Reed in the Dark, Part 2: When Despair Tells the Truth Poorly Depression is dangerous. Not because it kills the way cancer kills, but because it can turn suffering into self-destruction. It belongs to that terrible class of afflictions in which the sufferer’s own mind begins to argue against his will to live.…
Would your church receive George Washington or Thomas Jefferson into membership? The Fourth of July is here, and it is not a bad thing for a nation to remember its beginning. Nations, like men, forget easily. We forget the cost of things. We forget the blood beneath our comforts. We forget the contradictions buried under…
The Bruised Reed in the Dark (Part 1): Walking Gently There are sorrows in life that most people can understand. A death in the family.A marriage under strain.A child in trouble.A job lost.A diagnosis received.A betrayal that still has a name and a face. These sorrows hurt, and some of them alter the whole landscape…
George Stinney Jr., manufactured grievance, and the moral poverty of confusing media attention with justice. This is what injustice looks like. This is what injustice looks like. Not “my cable-news network covered this crime while the mainstream ‘liberal fake news’ outlets ignored it.” Not “this case did not get enough airtime on the outlets I…
Fox News Christianity, MAGA zeal, and the neighbors left as collateral damage Mike McCready recently wrote a sharp reflection on the MAGA mindset — not merely as a set of political opinions, but as a story people have been taught to inhabit. His point, in essence, is that many die-hard MAGA supporters are not unreachable because they…
I discussed Dispensationalism and its theology in the previous posts. But here is an important part of the story. There is also a reason why this framework has found particularly fertile ground in the American context. This instinct has deeper roots than we might first assume. From its earliest days, many of the first English…
As noted in the previous piece, dispensationalism is not merely a different way of arranging timelines—it is a different way of reading Scripture itself. And that matters. Because theology never stays on paper. It works its way outward—into how we see the world, how we understand nations, power, conflict… and ultimately, how we act. Here…
Dispensationalism did not fall from the pages of Scripture—it arose in the 19th century, most clearly through John Nelson Darby, and was later popularized in America by the Scofield Reference Bible. What made it so compelling was its apparent clarity: neat divisions of history, a sharp distinction between Israel and the Church, and a detailed…
Appealing to it as the primary explanation is an intellectually shallow reflex—one that reveals more about the speaker than it does about the situation itself. The real driver is something far less discussed and far more consequential: a modern strain of evangelical theology—simplistic, unbiblical, unhistorical, and utterly earthly—profoundly misapplied. What we are witnessing is not…
Our Secretary of Defense publicly promises “no quarter” to the Iranian army. He knows exactly what that means under the laws of war. He knows our soldiers are bound by those rules. He also knows that reckless talk from the top only puts potential American POWs in greater danger. Yet the performance continues. “War Barbie”…
Another “tough-guy” performance from Pete Hegseth. And as always, he delivers his lines as if he still cannot decide whether he is addressing the Pentagon, auditioning for Fox News, or ranting at the end of a bar. It may sound tough on television, but it betrays his cable-news habit of seeking applause and worrying about…
Short answer: yes, it can be. A noticeable erosion of empathy is one of the clearest by-products of cult-like, deeply polarized thinking. It is not merely the result of manipulation, but of sustained self-deception. People learn which facts to notice and which emotions to suppress. Outsiders stop being people. Cruelty becomes explainable. Indifference gets baptized.…
On Confidence, Authority, and Speaking of God’s Word There are few things more dangerous in public life than a man who mistakes his platform for wisdom. History is full of them. The Pharisees had it. The medieval scholastics who weaponized Scripture for politics had it. The 20th-century ideologues who wrapped their propaganda in moral language…
To outsiders, the claim of some evangelicals that the U.S. Constitution is a Christian document raises immediate—and understandable—concerns. A brief examination shows that such a notion overlooks glaring historical realities, none more striking than the Constitution’s explicit provisions for slavery (the Three-Fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause). These provisions stand in direct contradiction to the biblical…
I’ve been calling out some of the same things for a long while. Charlie Kirk’s horrific murder and its aftermath have only brought them into clearer view. There’s a lot of truth in what this man below (reel link) is saying, and I’m glad he’s a fellow evangelical and not a political opponent who is…
Fascist Past — Croatia’s Political and Cultural Schizophrenia A few of you have reached out to say you’ve been reading my posts (and comments) about Croatia’s fascist-sympathizing singer—and the government’s chronic unwillingness to sanction him in any meaningful way. This is a summary of my reflections in the wake of yet another public spectacle (his…
Yes, what about that. The notion of patriotism is connected with many strands to the topic of my previous post. My original intent was to address them together. However, it became obvious that the post was getting lengthier than expected, and so ‘extricating’ patriotism to its own heading seemed like the most sensible route. I…
Having received numerous inquiries about my post-election Facebook post, I realized that I had already scattered bits and pieces of relevant information across various forums. Much of what I’ve addressed falls under a common theme: an evaluation of Christian Nationalism. While I understand that this topic may not resonate with everyone, I’ve sought to compile my…
