In case you missed it, Tump has come out strongly in favor of warming relations with Russia. This is problematic for many reasons (I liken it to throwing open the gates of Rome to welcome the Barbarians), but most obviously it overlooks the unequivocal and indisputable fact that Russia interfered in our 2016 election in order to help him get elected. Conservatives everywhere have been systematically lying to themselves and to the wider public, if indeed they truly believe that Russia had no involvement and nothing to gain by seeing Donald Trump elected. Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, one a campaign manager and the other a close associate of the Trump campaign, have both been indicted by a Federal Grand Jury on charges of failing to disclose their foreign income.

While I was home in San Diego recently, I was sharply reminded that my brother and I are the only two people in our extended family who don't support him, and the defense of him was always the same: "What were we supposed to do, vote for Hillary??" Sometimes in life, when you're presented with awful choices, the best response is to simply reject the question. While many decry third party voting as a "wasted vote," it's important to remember that Abraham Lincoln was the first Third Party candidate in history to become President of the United States, and in doing so he transformed the Republican party from a bunch of unknown losers into a major political force.

Also while I was home recently, I had the opportunity to revisit my home church which I was raised in. While it is always a pleasure to see many familiar and beloved faces, it's also mildly discouraging to me to see that absolutely nothing has changed. I've been very blessed and fortunate for the last four years to be part of a church which is deadly serious about making sure their theology is Biblically sound, and that their parishioners are all well-versed in it. Going back to a place where the Gospel is merely a hood ornament on a neo-conservative, pro-Israel agenda reminds me why I stopped going to contemporary (as opposed to Reformed) churches altogether.

I'm sadly one of a very small minority of people in my family who oppose Donald Trump. Looking back through my old Facebook posts, it seems I made my first anti-Trump post on February 25th, 2016; well before the disastrous election which forced us all to choose between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. 

I also posted the following right after the election:

I bring this up because I recently read an article from the Economist about how young Evangelicals are abandoning the Republican Party in ever-larger numbers. While I struggle to go as far as the notoriously-liberal pundits at the Economist on what this means for the future of the Democratic party, I do agree that the younger generation of religious conservatives in this country have to make some hard choices about how to proceed in this new political climate.

I've written at length before about Isaiah 58, because it is a passage replete with meaning for our present time. One of the evils of Jerry Falwell's "Moral Majority" and its modern successors is that it conflates a sound, biblical faith with the idea that one must necessarily vote conservatively. There are numerous passages throughout both the Old and New Testament of the Bible which at times espouse some decidedly liberal viewpoints, including the requirement of a public safety net. While in general I do agree that a conservative translation of the Bible, as well as a conservative interpretation of it, are fundamental to a sound Christian faith, I can't deny the fact that the Bible is not an inherently Republican manifesto.

Ever since Trump first started his media rampage, he made it clear that he has no intentions of behaving in a humble or compassionate manner, nor of making any remote effort to be truthful. Lately, he has mocked the #MeToo movement and publicly shamed himself with a poem deriding immigrants, to name merely two recent examples of thoroughly un-Presidential behavior. While some of the elder generation may mistake this for mere candor, I find it to be a shamefully and astonishingly unbecoming standard of behavior for the highest office in our land.

I have never claimed to be a person of unassailable character, and I do believe in a God whose grace can cover over any personal faults. I also believe, however, that when a person assumes a mantle of leadership they also accept tacitly a burden of responsibility to act in a dignified, God-honoring manner that befits the trust he has given to them. Because immigrants, women, Muslims, and LGBT people are all image bearers of the Most High God, they are inherently deserving of the dignity and respect that we accord to our fellow believers in Jesus Christ. To believe that anyone is somehow an "animal" (which he narrowly applied to MS-13 members, but has since become a dog whistle for anti-immigrant racism) is not only contrary to our melting pot nation's history, but is at its basest level a denial of the human dignity of even the worst sinner.

Do I believe that immigration should happen legally? Sure. Will I ever support the dehumanization and blaming of an entire group of people for the actions of a few? Never.

God cares about the foreigner residing among us, and to say otherwise is to show one's ignorance of scripture. The Bible is not a Republican (nor a Democratic) manifesto, and to use it as such is to cheapen and defile it with the corrupting influence of human-made labels and political agendas. At number 5 on my list of 25 theses is the admonition that the church of Jesus Christ is not a political lobbying group.

This post is likely to be the first of many where I attempt to show that Trump is neither a good President nor a good reason to abandon sound biblical teaching simply to further a conservative agenda. If that irks and confuses you, then you're exactly who I'm writing these for. Let's just agree going forward that if you love Jesus Christ and his Word, there should be nothing in this life that is more important to you than that.

Buckle up...

Have you ever looked at a tiny human and thought to yourself, "I would die in an unhesitating instant, if it came to that, in order to protect you." ? I was recently struck by that thought, as I trust most parents are, for the first time. You literally don't even have the emotional capacity to process the love of God until you've felt that feeling in the pit of your soul. Jesus, God himself in human form, literally lived out those words for ME. It's a mind'blowing concept if you give it more than a few second's consideration. Jesus did not just step in front of a truck or donate his organs in order to save you, he literally lived an entire human life with full cognizance of the death that awaited him, knowing all along that it was you he'd be saving. His child. God's child for you, and Lord willing for your child as well.

I don't have some lengthy lesson here, that's just a thought that hit me that I needed time to really process in order to share. I may spend the rest of my life processing it.

If you don't have a personal, conversational relationship with God through the sole mediation of his Son Jesus Christ, you are missing out on the greatest relationship of all eternity. If you're unsure of how that all works, I highly recommend you pick up a copy of the Bible (I prefer NIV translation, though there are innumerably many good versions). I literally cannot implore you any more strenuously or simply than that. I built this blog because I made a commitment in my life a long time ago that I would choose to follow the words of the Bible (imperfectly, since we are all still human until we're someday restored to Glory) and to seek after Jesus Christ to the exclusion of all other earthly things and relationships.

I have been blessed in my life to have and to see many good, Christian parents, and in honor of Father's Day and Mother's Day being recently celebrated, I want to say a special thank you to my mom and dad for teaching me early and often about the Bible, because their love means the world to me, but their teaching means eternity.

I have no idea how so many good Christian parents have struggled their entire lives with this concept; that you need to love God more than your spouse, your children, or anyone else this life may give you. I know now how much a person can love their child, and yet God's love is a more perfect form of the mere representation he has given us in creation.

A lifelong friend of mine lost his father unexpectedly back in January. Recently we were catching up on the phone, because I wanted to see how he's doing and to update him on the latest decisions I'm facing in my personal and professional life. His best advice, and I write it here because I want to remember it for as long as the internet exists, is that you should leave nothing undone or unsaid in life if it's important to those whom you care about. For me, that's meant several things, including brazenly declaring my feelings for a few of the most important people in my life, not to mention making potentially life-altering decisions about my career.

My best advice to anyone and everyone is this: don't wait. Undeclared affections may be unreturned, but you will never know until you pluck up the courage and say something. If it's an important declaration that you've been holding on to regarding a family member, say it immediately and often (within reason, of course), and if you have the opportunity to spend quality time with them, do so. There is literally no guarantee in this life that you will die of old age. More importantly than making moves in life though is to make the only declaration that will still resonate in ten thousand years, which is that Jesus Christ is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.

Below are photos taken by my aunt when she visited the burial site of our family's ancestors who fought in the Civil War.

I started Civil War reenacting when I was 14 years old. At the invitation of our aunt and uncle, who were history teachers, our family decided to attend a Civil War reenactment in an abandoned California mining town called Calico. Since then, I've lived in Georgia for several years, where I fell in with another group of dedicated reenactors who portrayed both the 39th Georgia and the 3rd Wisconsin, depending on which side needed more muskets at any given event.

Well it happened. I met my daughter Margaret for the first time, and she was more beautiful than I ever could have imagined. The bible is replete with metaphors about God as a loving and compassionate father, and while it's not difficult to understand intellectually what that means, you truly can't feel what the love of a parent feels like until you become one yourself. There is no way I can truly articulate to you how it feels to be so instantly, hopelessly, irrevocably in love until you see your child for the first time.

There is nothing that my daughter could ever do in her entire lifetime, good or bad, that would make me love her more or less than I already do. She is mine, and that makes her unconditionally loved. In the past, I've been forced to explain to my parents some of the greatest mistakes I've made over the course of my life, only to hear them say every time, "we still love you." Now that I know what it is to love someone like that, it makes perfect sense. Her actions will never dictate the level of my love for her.

​While those of us who go by the title of Christian seek to spend our lives in pursuit of holiness, trying our best to become more Christlike every day, ultimately we know that there is no amount of effort we can put forth on our own to attain perfection. We all need to be reminded at times that the Christian life is not a treadmill of good works, and there is enough Grace in God's economy for every single sin. I'm reminded of that now every time I look into the face of my beautiful little girl.

Too often in life we forget that, "there is no one righteous, not even one." (Rom. 3:10) He knew from the beginning of time that we would never be able to perfectly keep the rules and laws he laid down for us, which is why from the beginning Jesus existed as the mediator who would come to satisfy the law and secure our right relationship with God once and for all.

Hopefully you will all one day share the joy of parenthood. When you do, entire passages of the bible will take on infinitely more meaning and depth than they've ever had before. You can't possibly understand what unconditional love is until you feel it for a tiny little human who is too helpless to even lift their own head, let alone feed and clothe themselves. Then you will see passages like Isaiah 46:3-4 differently:

You were as helpless as a newborn when God found you, unable to save yourself or even comprehend your need for a savior. Yet God, who knew you from the womb, loved you and cared for you enough to reveal himself to you by his Holy Spirit. He sustains us in our weakest and most depraved moments, and "does not treat us as our sins deserve, or repay us according to our iniquities."

​Though my sins were as scarlet, he has made them white as snow.

Today's topic begins with important international issues which I feel are not getting enough attention. Next, I move on to the importance of engaging on politically and religiously sensitive issues, and finally, I talk about the BIGGEST development in my life so far, and how it relates to the first two topics.

​Enjoy!

More more information on the Rohingya Crisis, see this article.
For more information on the conflict in Congo, see this article.
For a halfway-decent explanation of the complexities in the Syrian Civil War, see this roughly 7-minute video.

Tertullian, an early Church Father and Christian Theologian from the 2nd century A.D., is one of the first to record the importance of the phrase "memento mori." According to his account and other apocryphal stories,  this phrase was uttered by a slave to remind a triumphant military commander as he paraded gloriously through the streets of Ancient Rome that his victory was temporary, and ultimately life itself was fleeting.

Today, you'll hear my thoughts on life, death, and the recent passing of a friend's dad.

Here is a new and highly experimental method of communication for me, mostly because I'm tired of typing and editing my extensive ideas. Hope you enjoy, and Lord willing there will be many more to come.

The theme of this Podcast, as the title suggests, is "Trying Something Different."

Einstein said the definition of insanity is repeating the same actions and expecting a different outcome, so today I briefly utilize my new presentation method to explore what that means to me.

​Enjoy!

Obduration is, according to morphological analysis, a lexeme "obdurate," which serves as a root marked by morphological inflection (specifically affixation) to include the bound morpheme -ation, signifying the creation of a derivational morpheme for the condition or process of becoming hardened. Derived from a Latin etymology, the word obdurate is very often used in the context of a strenuous debate to refer to the hardening (durare) of one's position against another (the Latin prefix ob- signifying against).

Now that midterms are over, I'm free to focus a little more on issues in the wider world, not to mention show off a little of the knowledge which I so studiously crammed into my noggin. About a month ago, I had the pleasure of attending a "Meet the Fellows" open house which included a Democratic Congressman, a (female) BP Oil Executive, and several other media, corporate, and political insiders. After a brief sales pitch for their respective "Student Strategy Teams," designed to elicit student participation on some of the key issues facing our nation and world, the panel opened the floor up to a Q&A. The questions that followed were very enlightening, in particular one student asked, "what, in your opinion, is the most pressing or intractable issue facing our nation today?"

To a person, all the media, political, and corporate elites echoed the same sentiments: "Before we can tackle any issues, whether they be climate change, immigration, defense spending, or anything else that faces our nation and world, we cannot accomplish ANYTHING until we find a way to deal with and move past the political partisanship in this country." If there's one thing people of all stripes can agree on at this present moment, it's that something needs to be done... and nothing is happening.

Two weeks down in the semester, and I still haven't had a major panic attack. The reading schedules for these classes are challenging, but praise God it's not overwhelming. My courses this semester are: Intro to Linguistics, Intro to Philosophy, Intro to Theology, and Cognition. I can't really tell you how excited I am to be doing something new and different, and to have the opportunity to learn with greater depth and breadth than ever before on subjects about which I've always been passionate.

It's amazing to me how already my different courses and professors all seem to be pointing me unintentionally (at least from their perspective) to the same Truth, which is that God had a plan far more lengthy and detailed than my own when I set out from San Diego ten years ago this month. All four of my classes have made repeated reference to the importance of linguistics and language in the different areas of human knowledge and affairs.

My cognition class is extremely focused on the study of observable behavior as it pertains to the collection of processes known as "cognition." There are four main processes: perception, memory, thinking, and comprehension. One area where cognitive analysis is currently very interested is in the acquisition and processing of language, where we can directly measure the output based on the successful retention and use of another language.

In philosophy, we've already discussed how the empiricists such as Berkeley and Hume struggled against the rationalists like Descartes and Leibniz for supremacy in defining whether knowledge comes ultimately from perception or reason, resulting in a revolutionary synthesis by Kant which allowed the two to coexist. The professor also went into detail about the Romanticist period following the Enlightenment and how it generated a resurgence of interest in the Classical period. He specifically mentioned Ferdinand de Saussure, a renowned linguist and philosopher who explored the idea of "signs," or his so-named relationship between words and the objects or concepts they signified. This is of particular import to philosophy because Kant had previously argued that a "thing-in-itself" can never be known independently from the perceptual bias of its observer.

In theology, we've already explored and tried to define the nature of faith, whether it must necessarily be a quality of every individual to place "faith" in something or someone, and how one's faith in anything (be it the Judeo-Christian God or even the concepts of secular humanism and scientific exploration) necessarily requires us to structure our life and actions around a set of core beliefs. Further, and I believe we'll delve into this more in the coming weeks, we've talked about morality as it pertains to faith, and how moral codes are established and lived out by individuals and by groups.

Finally, in Linguistics itself, we've studied the mechanical process by which sounds are produced, and are beginning to unpack the places and methods of articulation. In each class, it amazes me how unique the gifts of language and communication are to human beings. I am very blessed to be at a school with a Jesuit worldview, and it reassures me to see that even the most atheistic professor (and there are still a few) can't help but muse at the possibility of man's special place in the order of the universe.

I won't go into too much detail about finances, but God has absolutely and unequivocally blessed me to be able to attend such an expensive university, thanks both to the GI bill and some generous financial aid from the school. Based on the quality of the facilities, the caliber of the students and faculty, and the depth of the instruction I've already received, I'd say it's been money well spent.