Murmurations: Part 2
By Tom Weiss
The ongoing weekly serial continues. Click here for the introduction and click here for Part 1.
Faith or Moralism?
Is your spiritual life based on genuine faith in God, or are you coasting on believing you’re a good person?
By Chris Queen
I’m going through the book of Romans with a friend of mine, and the first two chapters offer an interesting contrast. The second half of the first chapter talks about people who wallow in their sins and deny their need for repentance and salvation – and God – while chapter two talks about how religious people need the Gospel too.
The first half of the chapter warns against judging others. This isn’t in the sense that the world claims – that we don’t have the right to call out sin. It’s judgment in the sense of looking down on others whom we don’t perceive as being as “good” as we think we are. It’s an easy human tendency, and not just in religious and moral circles, to give the side-eye to people we deem as less worthy of love and attention as we think we are.
3 Hidden Horror Stories of Star Trek
By Tamara Wilhite
Many science fiction shows have horror stories hidden in the main storylines. I’ve written about these for Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5. Here are the biggest hidden horror stories in the Star Trek universe.
Murmurations, Part 1
A New Weekly Fiction Serial Begins
By Tom Weiss
This is the start of a new weekly sci-fi serial running on Wednesdays
a haiku for the 4th
By Jon Bishop
Light spiders brightness
across the dark and cool.
Yearly, lovely transcendence.
Independence Day Remains Worth Celebrating
By Robert Arrington
Independence Day, the 4th of July, falls on Sunday this year. The following day is the official holiday for that reason. Most Americans will do their best to celebrate the holiday, with perhaps more verve than last year, because the COVID pandemic is at last subsiding.
That’s as it should be. While the bold Declaration would not be brought to fruition on the battlefields of the Revolution for another five years, and not recognized by Treaty for another two years after that, the Declaration was one of history’s turning points, and set the infant nation on a course of republican representative government, in which the sovereign would be elected and there would be no hereditary aristocracy.
This 4th of July Remember that the American Revolution was More Restoration than Revolution
By David Churchill Barrow
Were the shopkeepers and farmers who took up arms at Lexington and Concord to fire “the shot heard ’round the world” out to turn their society upside down, they way the French peasantry would attempt a decade or so later? No, in fact the opposite. They were endeavoring to keep what they already had. They fired upon troops sent by a king and his minions who had forgotten that despite being “colonials” they were Englishmen first and foremost, with all the rights and privileges thereunto belonging. (As an aside, this is why Paul Revere never rode through towns yelling “The British are coming! The British are coming!” His hearers all considered themselves British.)
Not My Home
This Independence Day, let’s remember where our real citizenship is.
By Chris Queen
There’s and old gospel tune called “This World is Not My Home.” The song reminds us as believers that we’re not citizens of this world. In the 80s Lone Justice did a stellar version. Today we’re celebrating the birth of our nation, and Independence Day can be complicated when it falls on a Sunday. As a church staffer who has a hand in service programming, I can see the temptation to go overboard with patriotism. It’s something we’ve done before, as a matter of fact.
An Interview with Author Alaric Naudé
By Tamara Wilhite
I first got to know Alaric Naudé well when we had a discussion regarding Sapir-Whorf theory, something I discussed in my article “Books You Didn’t Realize Represented the Sapir-Whorf Theory”. Alaric Naudé is an expert on Asian languages. He’s also the Head Professor of English Department at Suwon Science College in South Korea. I interviewed him after his first non-fiction book The Babylon Cypher: Why Everything Is Language and Language Is Everything came out.
