Moore to Ponder Years ago when I was traveling to private schools on behalf of a ministry I then directed, I stopped in Colorado Springs to visit the Fountain Valley School. The headmaster, knowing that I was unfamiliar with the beauties of the West, one evening drove me out in his spacious brand-new RV to the edge of a remote lake. There he left me in complete darkness totally alone, with a refrigerator stocked with eggs and bacon, and the injunction: “Enjoy the silence of

I have been struck by the desperate attempt to find a secret, hidden motive behind the mass murders that Stephen Paddock unleashed from his 32nd floor window of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas on the evening of October 1. With his trove of 23 weapons and endless rounds of ammunition, he unleashed volley after volley of gunfire that took the lives of at least 58 people and wounded over 527 others. Surely, for the worst mass murder in modern American history, th

Much ink has been spilled over the place of Israel in biblical prophecy. Radio teachers regularly point to events in the Middle East as proof that ancient predictions are coming true today. What are we to make of this? Essentially two dominant views within the wider church have emerged to help believers navigate their way through the many Bible passages that speak of Israel not just as a collection of tribes in the ancient past, but as a people very much in the present and th

Why do Muslim immigrants radicalize? Two research scientists with degrees from the University of Maryland have argued in a recent New York Times that the difficulty of Muslim immigrants to assimilate into Western society is the primary reason why some of them radicalize. In addition, they argue that President Trump’s temporary ban on immigration from some predominantly Muslim countries only fuels this radicalizing tendency. They have a point. But their thesis is open to serio

One of Jesus’ more shockingly exclusive claims is John 14:6 — “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but by me.” Bring out the politically correct police, we’ve got a religious bigot on our hands! How strange, then, that this claim comes in the middle of a passage containing one of Jesus’ most inclusive statements: “In my house are many rooms … I go to prepare a place for you.” (John 14:2) Since this passage is often read at funerals, and since we a

In a closed universe nothing gets in, nothing gets out. The theory that there could be some force (personal or impersonal) that could act with total freedom to intrude into the locked system called the “Laws of Nature” is ipso facto ruled out. Closed-universe people comfort themselves with the fact that many scientists assume a closed universe” To them, even the thought of a cosmic designer is creepy. Their world-view takes a closed system as axiomatic. On the other hand, th

Everybody believes what they do about God, salvation, heaven and hell on the basis of testimony. This is not to discount our experience of God, or our perception of God as seen through nature. But it recognizes that our experience of God is highly subjective and everyone can see that nature’s witness to God is not uniform. Star-gazers may see immense beauty and order in nature, but Earth-gazers see floods, earthquakes, tornadoes and cancers. So, we rely on witness outside of