- Housing Crash Hitting Cities Once Thought to Be Stable... - e.g. Seattle "Few believed the housing market here would ever collapse. Now they wonder if it will ever stop slumping."
- Chuck Colson - Time for a Tech Fast: Reject Infobesity
- Chuck Colson - "Skins" and Teen Exploitation
- Michael Horton provides some notes from a recent conference call with evangelical leaders in Egypt.
- Justin Taylor at "Between Two Worlds" posts:
- Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way”
Denny Burk on Lady Gaga’s new song which has already been played over 9 million times, in its first four days, on her YouTube page:
“Born This Way” is making a theological point. It contends that sexual orientation is an innate and immutable quality of the human condition—a trait that we are “born” with. Whether you are gay, straight, or whatever, God made you this way, and for that reason you should embrace it. Or as Gaga herself puts it, “I’m beautiful in my way ’cause God makes no mistakes. I’m on the right track baby. I was born this way.”
The message of the song drinks deeply of the “is-ought” fallacy—the idea that we can determine what ought to be by observing what is. The song’s message also flies in the face of the Bible’s depiction of a fallen creation. It is true that God created human beings in His own image and that as a result every single human has intrinsic value and worth (Genesis 1:26-27). It is not true, however, that God endorses every thought and intention of the human heart. We live in a Genesis 3 world in which humanity and the cosmos are fallen and compromised by sin. That means that some of our desires are misdirected—even some of the ones that we are born with. That we desire sin from birth is not a cause for celebratory anthems but an indication of just how desperate the human condition really is (Psalm 51:5; 58:3; Jeremiah 17:9).