Thrown Away

Ninety-nine percent of the stuff you own eventually will be thrown away.

Political Profiteers

Why is it that people who attempt to financially profiteer in the wake of a natural disaster are objects of moral opprobrium and legal prosecution, but those who attempt to do so politically escape without the slightest hint of censure in the mainstream media?

People and Priorities

Make sure people top your list of New Year’s resolutions.

Future and Present

Plan for the future, but live in the present.

Protected and Pampered

The earthquake that killed more than 15,000 people in various parts of Asia this weekend reminds us how precarious life is. Compared with the rest of the world, we Americans enjoy a relatively protected and pampered existence. Yet we are the ones who seem to most loudly doubt God’s goodness when bad things happen.

Christ-mess

Celebrate Christmas without Christ and all you’re left with is the mess.

God Became Man

Christmas is meant to destroy our pride and renew our hope. The Bethlehem story reminds us that God became man that man might become fit for God. It is too good not to be true.

Selling Christmas

We’ve become so tolerant that “Christmas” is taboo in much of the culture. In commercials, big business tells us that everything from electric razors to luxury automobiles would make great “holiday gifts” (tap-dancing around the plain fact that far and away the most people who respond to their ads are in fact buying Christmas presents). I don’t want to come off as another Scrooge, but what if next year the more than nine in ten Americans who believe in God, the roughly eight in ten who believe that Jesus Christ was born from a virgin and is God or the Son of God, or the millions who confounded the experts and made Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ a mega hit purchased only from those merchants brave enough to sell them “Christmas gifts”?

Opposing Democracy

The killings of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians are not because the "insurgents" want the United States to stop running Iraq. For U.S. control to end, all they have to do is allow the democratic elections to take place on schedule in January. Rather, the incessant terrorism is meant to block or destroy the credibility of Iraq's democratic transformation, allowing the thugs to regain control. Ironically, it guarantees not that the U.S. will beat a hasty retreat, but that our soldiers will have to stay in the country even longer. To get the U.S. out of the country sooner rather than later, the terrorism must end.

Subversive Christmas

Be subversive. Wish someone a Merry Christmas.