The Bible may not have been the first place you turned to over the last couple of weeks to look for information about the Texas blackouts. This may be in part because some in the church today teach us that the Bible and Christianity are not really appropriate for the public square, that if we…
Category: Liberty
True Compassion
At my previous job, we tended to have lots of discussions about public policy. As part of that dialogue, an intern once asked: Is government regulation never a good thing? Even if regulations are designed to reduce pollution or cut down on secondhand smoke in restaurants (nominally good goals, although the regulations may be flawed/designed…
Compartmentalizing God
People in all ages have their conceits. For instance, a conceit of the ancient world was that man could manipulate the gods because the gods were a lot like man. Today, in the modern age, a major conceit is that we think we can compartmentalize God and keep Him in His place. Perhaps the primary…
What Does Liberty Look Like: Government and Rulers
One of the conceits of modern man is to deny the multiple spheres of government. When we hear the word government, we think almost exclusively of civil government. But it has not always been this way. As recently as 1828, Noah Webster defined government as: “Direction; regulation. “These precepts will serve as the government of…
What Does Liberty Look Like: Property
This is the fourth post in the ongoing What Does Liberty Look Like series. Last week we looked at the cultural mandate; this week we examine how God created the institution of private property to provide us with one of the means we need to carry out cultural mandate, i.e., how private property allows humans to fill…
What Does Liberty Look Like: The Cultural Mandate
This is the third post in the ongoing What Does Liberty Look Like series. In the last post we looked at the source of liberty, which is Jesus Christ. But to understand what Christian liberty looks like today, not just in our hearts and minds but in the world around us, we have to go…
What Does Liberty Look Like: The Source of Liberty
This is the second post in the ongoing What Does Liberty Look Like series. When Jesus began His ministry as recorded in Luke, this is what He read from Isaiah: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to…
What Does Liberty Look Like?
This is the first post in the ongoing What Does Liberty Look Like series. In a recent email with friends I mentioned that, “it is not so clear to me that the government having the power to tell people and hospitals what surgeries they can have and when they can have them—even during an emergency—is…
Shaping the Culture Through Christian Economics
I’ve spent the last 30 years of my life trying to free Texans from government oppression. Given that Texas’ biennial budget has grown from $46.4 billion in 1990-91 to the present $235.2 billion (with the government/budget being under Republican control most of those years) and with it the regulatory, confiscatory, and prosecutorial state has also…
A Christian, Liberty-Minded Reader on Culture, Science, Governance, and Economics
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years studying economics, governance, science, culture, etc. from a biblical perspective. Although a number of the books I’ve read are not written by Christians, by God’s common grace non-Christians can contribute to our understanding of the world and often do a better job than Christians–within limits. Here…