...what are you doing to pour yourselves into our future church leaders who will set examples, for better or for worse, for generations to come?

The filthiness of our national politics has brought to my mind a question put to me nearly 20 years ago by one of my teachers. “Don’t you think there is more lying in politics than there used to be?” he asked. “Why do you think that this is happening?”

Parables were a form of communication that always stressed one central idea. The rest of the story is usually extraneous, merely a prop to convey the central meaning.

Question from a reader: My wife and I do not feel called to have children. I’m 42, and she’s 40. We both have fulfilling career ministries and I’m wondering about getting a vasectomy.

Peter Singer, the Princeton professor, wrote in his ethics textbook, “The life of a fetus is of no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, etc.”

I was challenged to explain why prolife people can be for war that kills some innocents (for the good of the situation and others lives) and not see the parallels in embryonic stem cell research for those whose lives would be protected and health cured. I would love to know your take on this.

Conservatism is popular among American evangelicals. In the moral realm that encourages me. In the political realm, I have mixed feelings.

Let me first say, before I speculate, what I know for sure. As I’m sure you know, Scripture teaches that it is God that opens and closes the womb, and that children are a blessing of the Lord (Psalm 127).

Who determines which lives are meaningful and which aren’t? The answer, always, is that powerful people decide whether weaker people’s lives are meaningful.