When our thinking is errant or misguided, it will negatively impact our life. This is not only true for those who don’t know the Lord but for Christians as well. Yes, I am saying that you can be a genuine Christian and still be screwed up in the way you think. But you don’t have to stay that way. You … Continue Reading →

The post Change Your Thinking, Change Your World appeared first on Frank King's Blog.

In the Book of Exodus, God takes the form of a burning bush to reveal himself to Moses. Today’s GOP establishment seems to be revealing its agenda by way of a Bush, too. What worked for the Israelites, however, may not turn out so well for the GOP.

That’s because the establishment agenda Bush seems poised to offer is strikingly out of step with the voters who will decide the 2016 Republican nomination and the general election.

The post Jeb’s Prospects appeared first on Ethics & Public Policy Center.

An (unsigned) editorial by R. A Torrey in the September 1916 edition of Biola’s King’s Business shares a story about a busy pastor learning a lesson about time management. Seven resignations in one day is pretty inspirational (though in retrospect the better part of wisdom

The post Stick to Your Proper Business appeared first on The Scriptorium Daily.

Psalm 84:5-7 Blessed is the man whose strength is in You, Whose heart is set on pilgrimage. As they pass through the Valley of Baca, They make it a spring; The rain also covers it with pools. They go from strength to strength; Each one appears before God in Zion.   UFC, This verse really […]

The post Strength appeared first on United Faith Church.

Eugenie Bouchard, a Canadian women’s tennis player ranked #8 in the world, laid an impressive beating on her opponent in the Australian Open this week, 6-0, 6-3. But the news coming out of the match wasn’t focused so much on her game as on the on-court interview afterward.

The Australian interviewer, speaking with Bouchard in front of the entire stadium, began to comment on her outfit, a bright pink skirt and corresponding pink top. He then requested that she give the crowd a twirl to show off the ensemble. She obliged with a girlish grin and some sheepishness, the crowd applauded, and she went on to commend Serena Williams’ outfit above her own.

The media has since erupted with accusations of sexism. “Twirlgate” (not so catchy, I guess) reached the front pages of ESPN and Yahoo. The aforementioned Serena’s response to the incident: “I wouldn’t ask Rafa [Nadal] or Roger [Federer] to twirl.”

Therein lies the problem. When Roger Federer was a little boy, he didn’t run into the living room, call for his parents’ attention, and twirl his outfit in front of them (he wasn’t wearing something twirlable to begin with).

But Serena did. Eugenie did. They were little girls, who were made to display the beauty they were given and to have that beauty honored. My daughters are perpetual twirlers, even to the extent that they are searching out the most twirlable skirts and dresses. They come to me unashamed. They giggle, they twirl, their smiles radiate with my delight. Only a bad father would stop their twirling to reprimand their self-misogyny.

So this raises the question: When Eugenie Bouchard grew up (she’s 20 now), did she grow from girl to man? Or at least, Did she grow up and lose the inherent desire in girls that makes twirling okay? My answer to each is an emphatic no. I have two reasons.

The first reason is evidential. Why are Eugenie and Serena wearing the outfits in the first place? Are they not intentionally demonstrating their feminine beauty to the world? Even in the realm of professional sports, where muscle and traditionally masculine qualities are on display, the ladies are distinctly seeking to be ladies. The diversity and intentionality of the on-court outfits of the Women’s Tennis Association are more striking than their racquets. I would argue that they are living in a perpetual twirl, and that they should. Eugenie Bouchard is inviting the world to see her beauty, to see the feminine glory of God. And in a godly world, there would be a strong, bold, and tenderhearted man who would honor her and delight in her as her father did, as her heavenly Father does.

This gets into the second reason, which is biblical. Isaiah 62 is a clear demonstration of the biblical paradigm for femininity. Israel, the unfaithful bride of the Lord, is mourning the loss of his delight. But he makes a wondrous promise in this chapter:

The nations shall see your righteousness,
and all the kings your glory,
and you shall be called by a new name
that the mouth of the Lord will give.
You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord,
and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.
You shall no more be termed Forsaken,
and your land shall no more be termed Desolate,
but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her,
and your land Married;
for the Lord delights in you,
and your land shall be married.
For as a young man marries a young woman,
so shall your sons marry you,
and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
so shall your God rejoice over you. (Isaiah 62:2-5)

The way that a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, in all her multi-layered beauty, is the way that God rejoices over his people. The dynamic of women displaying their beauty for others to rejoice over is endorsed by God. Eugenie applauded Serena’s outfit. The audience applauded Eugenie’s. And perhaps God applauded, too, as this girl he created in his image acted like a girl.

Because God’s beauty is in his creation, we dishonor him and his creation when we conceal that beauty, and we dishonor him and his creation when we exploit it. Even in our hyper-sexualized society, there is a way to purely recognize beauty, and to honor it. We appreciate what it is about God’s wondrous design that makes women, not men, twirl.

Related Resources

• An Olympic Lesson for Husbands and Wives (article)

• John Piper’s Message to Ray Rice (Special Episode) (interview)

• Feminine Beauty in God's Eyes (interview)

A few choice things to think about… Organizations that had strong norms for adaptability performed much better. There is a strong relationship between the culture of an organization and the organization’s performance. Willingness to experiment, quick to opportunity, being flexible, willing to tolerate some failure. Managers should be sensitive to the fact that what they … Continue reading Adaptability and Success

The post Adaptability and Success appeared first on John Saddington.

Obama’s sixth State of the Union address was an homage to France. The president might not have intended it as such — he mentioned the nation only glancingly when denouncing terror attacks in Pakistan and Paris — yet France was at the heart of the president’s address.

France has everything that Barack Obama finds wanting in his own country. His entire presidency is a prolonged effort to tear the United States away from free-market economics and decentralized political power (what the French deride as the “Anglo-Saxon model”) toward the kind of socialist, government-dominated society that France has achieved.

France is Obamaland. Government sucks up 56 percent of GDP. The state offers cradle-to-grave subsidies for child care, health, disability, unemployment, old age, and more. The welfare state discourages work in myriad ways — most French retire at age 60, and many at 55. The work week is 35 hours. (Obamacare defines it as 30 hours.) France’s labor code is 3600 pages long (sound familiar?) and makes it practically impossible to fire anyone. Shockingly, businesses are wary about hiring. France’s growth rate has averaged .3 percent annually since 2008. Everyone from taxi drivers to notary publics to dentists goes on strike at the drop of a chapeau.

All of this looks like paradise to President Obama. Consider his latest brain storm: He wants the first two years of community college to be “free” for students who maintain a C+ average. “Free” is a word Democrats use to mean “you pay, not me.” It’s deceptive, because when the state takes on more debt than we can possibly repay, it’s the poorest who suffer the most in the crash that eventually comes. Ask the Greeks, or the Italians, or the Spanish, or speakers of la belle langue. The French have “free” (or nearly so) public education all the way through university. The system suits students who are terrific test-takers (grades don’t matter much), but their system would never be tolerated here. Students are culled through high-stakes tests starting at age 15. The American ideal of second chances and “it’s never too late” doesn’t translate. Besides, France’s generous education subsidies are part of what is bankrupting the country.

France boasts “free” health care, too — Barack Obama’s beau ideal. France has a modified single-payer system, with tremendous regulation and red tape from the central government. In 2010, according to an OECD study, 47 percent of French patients had to wait four weeks or longer to see a specialist compared with 20 percent of Americans. That, of course, was before Obamacare, so don’t worry, we’ll likely catch up. Then there’s this nugget from Businessweek: “Anita Manfredi got nine massages and 18 mud baths at a luxury spa in November. The French government paid two-thirds of the $1,022 bill.” She feels much better, you’ll be glad to know. French taxpayers also pay for taxi rides to and from clinics and other luxuries. Businessweek quotes a London financier who describes France’s system as “simply unaffordable, unsustainable, and . . . a huge burden on the economy.”

Doubtless Mr. Obama admires France’s approach to immigration. For decades, France has been absorbing millions of Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa and now finds that a small but dangerous minority of those newcomers are jihadists bent on destroying liberté, egalité, and especially fraternité. Unemployment in the banlieues (the suburbs where most immigrants reside) is 40 percent among the young. In 2005, the banlieues were the site of three solid weeks of rioting.

There are cultural problems integrating Muslims into French society, and economic stagnation has led many, immigrant and native-born alike, to lose hope. A young man whose parents immigrated from Tunisia told the Telegraph “When my parents came here, France had lots of work. Now it has lots of fascists.”

Socialist president François Hollande’s idea — almost indistinguishable from Mr. Obama’s — was to impose a 75 percent tax on millionaires. Mr. Hollande sold it as an effort to make the rich pay their fair share. It was signed into law in 2013. One year later, it was quietly buried. It didn’t bring in much revenue, but it did cause a number of successful Frenchmen to leave the country.

France has its virtues, but the policies Obama admires have brought the nation stagnation, unemployment, high taxes, constant strikes, restive and unassimilated immigrants, and domestic terrorism. The French don’t seem to know what went wrong. Our president doesn’t either.

— Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. © 2015 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

The post France: Obama’s Paradise appeared first on Ethics & Public Policy Center.

I’d now like to introduce a special guest, sitting in the gallery, who has come a long way to be with us tonight.

Dr. Olha Bohomolets is a member of the Ukrainian parliament whose preparation for her current public responsibilities ought to draw our deepest respect. Dr. Bohomolets is a physician, and during the Maidan Revolution of Dignity in Kyiv she dedicated herself entirely to providing medical assistance to those wounded by the troops of then-president Viktor Yanukovych and his Russian special-forces allies. Not only did this fearless woman provide immediate medical care to the wounded; she helped keep Ukrainian freedom fighters out of those hospitals in which they were in danger of being kidnapped by Yanukovych’s internal-security forces.

I spoke with Dr. Bohomolets earlier today, at the White House, and she told me that because of the use of BM-21 Grad rockets by the Russian troops  now deployed in southern and eastern Ukraine, and the brutality regularly displayed there by these Russian troops and their so-called “separatist” allies, it is impossible to identify some 40 percent of the bodies being brought back to unoccupied Ukraine from the Donbass region. The bodies are too mangled — sometimes nearly disintegrated — by attacks from the Grad multiple-rocket launchers.

Fourteen months after the Maidan Revolution of Dignity began in Kyiv, the facts on the ground in Ukraine are unmistakably clear. There is no “Ukrainian crisis” in which “separatist” elements are contending with the government of President Petro Poroshenko for control of the Donbass region. Rather, Russia has been and is conducting an invasion of its neighbor, Ukraine, an armed aggression using various lethal forms of asymmetrical warfare. And to provide cover for that invasion and that undeclared war, the government of President Vladimir Putin has conducted a campaign of prevarication and disinformation that might bring a blush to the cheek of Dr. Goebbels.

Ukraine’s sovereignty has been violated. Many of Ukraine’s citizens have been murdered or taken hostage. Ukraine’s path to economic stability and eventual prosperity has been blocked by the necessity of diverting resources that could have been used to undertake economic and political reforms to the defense, not only of Ukraine’s territory, but of its very right to exist as an independent nation.

The recent ratcheting up of Russian and Russian-backed violence in southern and eastern Ukraine is, as President Putin’s ideological tutors used to say, “no accident.” Having deceived the Russian people through its control of the communications media and its steady disinformation campaign, the Putin regime is now faced with a degree of popular unrest with which it is uncomfortable, thanks to Russia’s economic downturn. That downturn has been exacerbated to some degree by the sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union in the wake of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. But its deeper causes are structural, for what Putin and his allies have constructed is a mafia state atop a crumbling society, the stability of which is dependent on the foreign income derived from high energy prices. The tacit deal Putin made with his people years ago — I’ll make your lives better, year by year, and you’ll stay out of politics — is coming unglued. So now Putin is trying to distract his people from the implosion of the Russian economy and its immediate effects on their lives — from the fact that Russia now imports potatoes from Romania — by ginning up foreign enemies and appealing to revanchist sentiments that touch deep chords in certain aspects of Russian culture.

Putin’s latest gambits in Ukraine would also seem to be intended as a growl at the E.U. and the U.S.: but let us not be so foolish, or pusillanimous, as to be frightened by his baring his teeth and claws. What may be Russia’s short-term aim here — rewriting the Minsk Agreements of last September in a fashion even more unfavorable to independent Ukraine — is an aim that it shall be our aim to frustrate.

The Ukrainian people are determined to defend the Maidan Revolution of Dignity, and have shown that they are willing to risk their very lives to do so. The defense of the Donetsk airport, for example, has demonstrated that Ukraine’s undermanned and underequipped forces are nevertheless capable of stout resistance to Russian aggression. That display of grit, and the commitment to democratic ideals that lies behind it, demands our respect.

But it demands more. It demands action on our part.

Therefore, I am announcing tonight the following emergency measures. Some are aimed at providing Ukraine with the capacity to defend itself from aggression, whether that aggression be in the form of armed assaults on Ukrainian territory or propaganda about what is under way in Ukraine. Others address the short- and long-term rebuilding of a free, prosperous, and secure Ukraine, which can be an example to all the states of the former Soviet Union, including Russia.

First, we shall supply Ukraine’s armed forces with the defensive weaponry necessary to meet the aggression under way in the Donbass, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons.

Second, we shall conduct intensive satellite reconnaissance of southern and eastern Ukraine and release the photographic results of that reconnaissance, so that there can be no doubt whatsoever about the weaponry that Russia has deployed in its invasion of Ukraine — or indeed about the invasion itself.

Third, I am instructing the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv to try to establish contact with the hostages now being held by the “separatists” in the Donbass, and I call upon the American news media to give those efforts full coverage, so that the world may know the truth of who is doing what to whom in southern and eastern Ukraine.

Fourth, I am asking the leaders of our major European partners to meet with me here in Washington next week to consider further sanctions against Russia, including detaching Russia from the SWIFT international banking system. At the same time, I shall ask the Washington-based leaders of the IMF and the World Bank to meet with my European colleagues and me to consider an emergency package of assistance to Ukraine that will prevent it from going into default on its international debt obligations, and a more comprehensive program of assistance, on the model of the Marshall Plan, to begin in Ukraine no later than September 1, 2015.

Helping Ukraine secure the future envisioned by the brave men and women who faced down both freezing weather and sniper bullets on the Maidan last year ought to be a bipartisan effort. Therefore, I shall meet as soon as possibly with Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader McConnell, and Minority Leaders Pelosi and Reid with the aim of forming a joint task force on Ukraine, involving members of the House and Senate and key administration personnel, so that whatever legislative action is needed to help Ukraine defend itself against today’s increasing Russian aggression, and to help our Ukrainian democratic allies build a future of peace, security, and prosperity, can be expedited. That task force will also, I hope, let President Putin know that the Congress and the administration are of one mind when it comes to our determination to secure the victory of freedom that was won in the Cold War and ratified by the events of 1989 and 1991 in Central and Eastern Europe.

For that is precisely what is at stake now in Ukraine.

[Applause.]

— George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

The post POTUS on Ukraine: A Reverie appeared first on Ethics & Public Policy Center.