A Biblical Case for Lavish Spending (and Adoption)

For the first 20 years of my adult life, I didn’t give enough thought to making money. That was a mistake, disguised as a virtue, and it hurt my family in ways that are difficult to overcome. The irony, of course, is that one of the surest means of turning money into an idol is to not make enough of it. Because it’s not money that’s the problem. It’s the hoarding of money—and that can be as much a temptation for the poor as the rich. Maybe even more so. I’m not claiming to be poor, not by a long shot, but I have created problems for my family by not making enough money. Actually, that’s not quite the issue. I’ve created problems for my family by not spending enough money. I’ve always thought saving to be a virtue and spending to be a vice, but I may have gotten that backwards. And I haven’t proved at all adept at saving anyway. To the one who has, more will be given. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. Or, to borrow a line from the estimable Leia Organa: The more you tighten your grip, the more will slip through your fingers—be it money or star systems. 

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Comics Who Kill Have Noticed Something About Abortion

Bill Burr put together a Netflix comedy special last year called Friends Who Kill. I haven’t seen it. Based on reviews, I probably won’t. But the name still got my attention. Friends who kill. I don’t think Burr is claiming to be intimate with murderers or hit men. No, these are friends who kill in the comedic sense. They slay audiences by making them laugh—which, in general, is a good thing. Here’s another good thing. A growing number of comedians who kill are recognizing that abortion does the same. Kills, that is—and not in the metaphorical sense. Abortion is a straight-up slayer. Literally and objectively.

As topics of conversation go, few things are less funny than abortion. If you’ve been exposed at any real length to pictures of abortion victims or heard testimony from the countless mothers who’ve had their souls crushed by regret, there isn’t much to laugh at. But perhaps there’s even more danger in not laughing at abortion. Abortion, after all, is a sacred cow of the…

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Abortion is Killing Our Children—In the Womb and in the Schoolyard

It’s been nine days since the lives of three 9-year-olds were violently aborted at a Christian school in Nashville—seven miles from my old apartment. I realize that “abort” is not the word we normally use to describe the murder of born children, but it does fit the technical definition. Their lives were terminated prematurely—by a severely deranged woman whose delusions were propped up by a society that now insists there is no such thing as normal and no such thing as deviance. Should we be surprised then when such violence occurs? Or surprised that so many media voices are more intent on blaming the victims—like the three staff members who were also killed—than in actually finding a root cause? As someone who belonged to a Presbyterian church in Nashville and has a 9-year-old son, these are not happy musings. 

It was 25 years ago next month that another school shooting forever altered the trajectory of my professional life. I was working in downtown Nashville at the time—some 2,400 miles away from the carnage that was wrought in Springfield, Oregon, on May 21, 1998. That Thursday marked the second time in…

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Uncle Screwtape Proposes Celibacy (and Abortion)

When C.S. Lewis first published The Screwtape Letters in 1942, legal abortion was still decades away, but it’s not hard to imagine how Screwtape and his cadre of demonic tempters would have salivated at the prospect. You mean “civilized” men and women will hire greedy profiteers to cut their unborn babies to pieces—all in the name of equality?! Yes, please! If you’ve never had the pleasure (and pain) of reading Lewis’ masterpiece, by all means start with the original and circle back. It tells the tale of a senior devil giving counsel and rebuke to a junior tempter. And don’t forget his follow-up, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” Published in 1959, it is a shockingly prescient read in 2023. Here’s Screwtape’s demonic advice on bringing the Western world to its knees:

"Democracy" is the word with which you must lead them by the nose… You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name…

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U.S. Abortions Increase for Fourth Straight Year in Final Year of Roe

I’m going to tell you today what the Centers for Disease Control won’t announce for another 10 or 11 months. It’s not good news. America’s abortion rate and abortion total rose for the fourth straight year in 2021—which was the final year of Roe v Wade. There’s some hope that the fall of Roe last June will have reduced total abortions in 2022—at least marginally, but we probably won’t know that for at least another year. As I’ve lamented before, the dearth of timely and reliable statistics makes abortion even harder to combat. By the time a trend emerges, it’s already 2-3 years behind us. 

As you may already know, there are two sources for abortion data in the United States—and neither offers complete results. The CDC publishes an abortion report each year, typically 23 months after the fact, but they don’t include abortions from California, Maryland, New Hampshire, or most of New Jersey. Those states don’t collect and report abortion…

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There is No Brave New World Without Abortion

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931. His onetime pupil George Orwell published 1984 in 1949. Three quarters of a century later, their chilling visions of the future retain tremendous cultural cachet—and rightly so. They offer warnings that grow more relevant with each passing decade, but how many people have actually read them (or even know they exist)? It's much easier, after all, to describe something as "Orwellian" than it is to sit down with Nineteen Eighty-Four—and much simpler to stream a cinematic adaptation than it is to turn the pages of a 90-year-old book. These tendencies, of course, are two of the very things each classic warns against—if only we'd take the time to read them. Those in the know have a vague sense that both works warn of oppressive authoritarian futures, but what good is such knowledge if we can't recognize the specific threats? Not much, so I'm going to I.D. one of those threats for you. A big one. It's called abortion.

Brave New World and 1984 both present futures run by bloated totalitarian governments that have sacrificed freedom…

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