Most of us are familiar with William Wilberforce for his long but ultimately successful struggle to abolish the slave trade in England. “God Almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.” We know far more about the first object than the latter but it is that reformation of manners that interests me as we watch our country head into a similar reformation in a search for all manner of purity. He became concerned about the large number of death sentences carried out in England at that time. Believing that people punished for petty crimes would be less likely to…

I think it was long-time Chaplain of the Senate Dick Halverson who said, “In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next it moved to Europe where it became a culture, and, finally, it moved to America where it became an enterprise.” My introduction to the enterprise was in the late 60s as a college student employed by Word Records in Waco, Texas. Word had begun in 1951 as the brainchild of Jarrell McCracken with the publishing of a single…

In his documentary film, “Korengal,“ author and director Sebastian Junger recounts the stories of a platoon of American soldiers deployed to a tiny and dangerous outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. The “grinding boredom gives way to bowel-emptying fear, followed sometimes by episodes of nearly psychedelic blood lust and the frankly sexual pleasure of unleashing a .50-caliber machine gun on enemies who are doing the same to you.” While the film is horrifying to watch, Junger’s book, ”The Tribe” makes the case that coming home from war is often harder than risking your life: “There is something to be said for using risk to forge social bonds…Having something to fight for,…