A Just Man

    Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame,...
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A Prayer for the Vulnerable

  Sometimes it is difficult to know how to pray, and we are helped by the words of others. The following is a prayer for the vulnerable, particularly the unborn, taken from Psalm 35. Contend, O LORD, with those who contend with the vulnerable—children who cannot contend for...
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When Freedom Is Bondage

  No one really believes in utterly free, unfettered choice. There are good choices and bad choices, and an enduring challenge in life is to know the difference. There are choices that we forbid ourselves and others to make. For instance, I have a legal right to drive my car...
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The Slide to Abortion

    Perhaps you know this Old Testament story (2 Samuel 11). King David, on his roof after a nap, spied a married woman, Bathsheba, bathing on her own roof below. Admiring her beauty, he sent for her and lay with her. Shortly afterward, Bathsheba sent the king word that...
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The Lame, the Blind . . . and the Pregnant?

    Behold, I will bring them from the north country and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, the pregnant woman and she who is in labor, together; a great company, they shall return here. (Jeremiah 31:8) In considering...
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Burial of a Queen

    God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in...
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Back to Go Forward

    C.S. Lewis, the Cambridge medievalist and philosopher, had a rule-of-thumb: Read two old books for every new one. By so doing, one can avoid “chronological snobbery,” by which he meant unreflectively assuming we know better than those who have gone before us. We are...
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Martin Luther King—In His Own Words

    In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, I thought I’d offer some quotes from his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” written from a prison cell to the clergy in 1963. Parts of the letter have become well known, such as King’s insistence that “Injustice...
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Live Not by Lies

    My son and I are reading through a biography of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer and dissident who exposed to the world the brutal and then hidden underbelly of Soviet brutality, and who pleaded with the world—East and West—to “live not by lies.”  This...
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God Sees Her

  “Truly here I have seen him who looks after me” (Genesis 16:13). Recently, I was speaking to a friend over lunch, a woman who has given herself to what we might call the issues of life, particularly abortion and euthanasia/assisted suicide. Speaking of our culture’s...
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