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Stay away… If you want your teenage daughter to avoid pregnancy (or your son to not get a girl pregnant), turn off the racy TV shows. If you want your teenager to abstain from sex until marriage, stay away from church. If the first suggestion makes sense and the second doesn’t, read on.
Look in their eyes Be sure to vote this Tuesday. But wait until Sunday morning at church to catch the election results. Whichever candidate wins, look for the look on your friends’ faces. In too many cases, it will tell you the New Deal beat the New Covenant.
The Real Deal From a distance, the curved glass china cabinet in our dining room looks like the Real Deal. Friends admire it, so it surprises them to learn it’s a reproduction. It might surprise you to learn that much of modern Christian faith – our message, method, and mindset – is a reproduction. Yet…
Lost horizon If the worldwide credit crisis has you feeling a bit disoriented, do what good pilots do – keep your eye on the horizon. First of all, the Panic of 2008 is a crisis of trust. In this case, how did some of the smartest people in the world make such bad decisions? Restoring…
Awakening from an abyss In March of 1985, Clive Wearing disappeared into an abyss. Struck by a brain infection in his mid-forties – a herpes encephalitis – Wearing was left with an amnesia that wiped out virtually his entire past. Yet, one faculty was left totally intact. When his wife, Deborah, accidentally discovered it, Clive…
by Mike Metzger & John Seel A difference with a distinction What’s the difference between Esperanto and E*TRADE? Other than the fact that you’ve probably never heard of Esperanto, there is a deeper difference between the two. It’s a difference with a distinction. Esperanto helps only a handful of people, while E*TRADE is part of…
Leveraging love The financial crisis gripping the country leaves some people desiring to decapitate a few capitalists. But the fact is, many who follow Christ are also culpable. For years we have wagged our finger at capitalism and consumerism, all the while ignoring “our most urgent missionary task,” according to one wise missionary. The task…
The rest of us When you think of Britain, you think tea drinkers, right? When you imagine China, you imagine communists, right? In both cases, you’d be partly right but mostly wrong. So when you hear that 94% of Americans believe in God, what do you imagine – an enthusiastically religious country? In this case,…
Cascading books Two bookends that bind American culture are the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Without them, our freedoms collapse like cascading books. Two bookends that bind American capitalism are Adam Smith’s 1776 classic An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and… what else? Smith also wrote the…
Appetites & Appetizers
Michael Metzger
November 10, 2008
Stay away… If you want your teenage daughter to avoid pregnancy (or your son to not get a girl pregnant), turn off the racy TV shows. If you want your teenager to abstain from sex until marriage, stay away from church. If the first suggestion makes sense and the second doesn’t, read on.