Ronald V. Huggins

One thing that is important to remember is that news is a product just like cigarettes are a product, and just like cigarettes, it isn't very good for you. It might even be a good idea for the Surgeon General to write up a little warning to be shown in connection with the news. Just as cigarettes calm you down, coffee wakes you up, and alcohol makes you feel jolly and sociable, news gives you a satisfying rush of self-righteous rage, and that make's you feel all good and warm inside.  News has nothing to do with "just reporting the facts." That's boring. No...facts aren't news unless they can somehow be served up on a dish of scandal, unless there is a clearly identified good guy and bad guy in the story and so on. And as cigarettes comes in both regular and menthol, so news is packaged according to our likes and dislikes. As a result when people tune into the news they are literally being served up carefully edited stories from alternate universes, ea

 Someone commented about this: "I take issue with this. By no measure will we have 'done well' by just meeting those standards. Christians should be held to the highest standards of obedience." Well naturally. Yet I think Hauerwas's comment underscores an social dynamic, namely, that When a society embraces evil it invariably hides the true character of what it is doing from itself under the guise of a campaign promoting some great moral good. At such times the Church will be applauded for joining in the great campaign and even perhaps for taking moral stands on any number of other issues as well. They will never be applauded or taking a stand on whatever THE crucial issue of the time happens to be, THE issue that faithfulness to both the well being of their community and to Christ requires them to take a stand on. Quite the contrary they will be viewed as opposing the good that is being used to veil the evil, and of being motivated by an unhealthy foc

The title gives the false impression that 1/3 of Americans are Holocaust deniers, which was doubtless their intention. But when you read the article  you discover that the numbers presented relate to people being ignorant about and not at all denying the Holocaust. "93 percent of those asked think the Holocaust should be taught in schools, while 96 percent believe that the genocide happened." and Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), told Newsweek that the ADL's research shows Americans “overwhelmingly—almost universally,” know the Holocaust happened. The basis of the article is a survey published by he Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany entitled: " New Survey by Claims Conference Finds Significant Lack of Holocaust Knowledge in the United States ." (see at http://www.claimscon.org/study/) The survey shows that Americans are generally ignorant of the basic facts of the holocaust. Here is an example: &q

"Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear." Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (chap. 40). While the issue of when a fetus becomes human is one that can and should be discussed in certain contexts, such as the cases of individual conscience, the clear message of the recent New York abortion law is that such considerations are no longer relevant to the legal debate, since there can really be no grounds for legitimate doubt that in aborting a full-term baby you are killing a fully viable human being. Indeed, at this point in New York the term “infanticide” represents a fully appropriate synonym for what they are actually endorsing. Henceforth therefore when discussing the issue of the progress of abortion in America, we should avoid being detained by questions regarding ambiguities related to early stages of fetal development.  On the level of public policy, they are simply no lo

One of the things that the New York law should do is to cause the Church to seek clarity.  I used to think that the human conscience, being, as Charles Spurgeon once described it, “the candle of the Lord,” would ultimately lead a person right if they followed it. I no longer believe that. While it is true that the conscience drives us in the direction of moral rectitude the reality is that it can be co-opted and subverted into endorsing evil when that evil is plausibly presented to it as a positive good, through the means of a narrative in which the actual bad guys are cast in the role of good guys, victims, heroes, and so on, and the good guys or neutral guys are cast in the role of villains, persecutors, devils, etc. If such a false story is believed by the person, the conscience can really embrace it, even if in reality the narrative is actually a dangerous, even monstrous lie. And then once the person takes the additional step of actually acting on the belief, actually com

Why do crimes against humanity come to be view by the societies perpetrating them as act of virtue? This is a question that has presented itself to us time and time again through human history and now does so anew in the New York law allowing up-to-birth abortion. Actions like this on the part of legislatures illustrate well how acts, any acts, no matter how inherently reprehensible, barbaric or inhuman, can be and are normalized in a society to the point that they come to be viewed as not only as acceptable but as virtuous. This is accomplished in part by veiling the true nature of the acts under descriptions that consist of virtue bearing euphemistic language, such as, in this case, speaking of "reproductive rights," a modern parallel to the old South's cry of "States Rights," or in high-sounding but inherently contradictory cliches, like "women's lives matter," which is not of course taken to apply in the case of unborn women. We saw this in

Note: I'm not interested in what this article says about Trump or Cohen, but rather about what it says about the guy Cohen hired, namely John Gauger who is said to be "chief information officer at Liberty University in Virginia." Two passage I find particularly remarkable: "In January 2014, Mr. Cohen asked Mr. Gauger to help Mr. Trump score well in a CNBC online poll to identify the country’s top business leaders by writing a computer script to repeatedly vote for him. Mr. Gauger was unable to get Mr. Trump into the top 100 candidates." Key phrase: "writing a computer script to repeatedly vote." And then secondly: "Mr. Cohen also asked Mr. Gauger to create a Twitter account called @WomenForCohen. The account, created in May 2016 and run by a female friend of Mr. Gauger, described Mr. Cohen as a “sex symbol,” praised his looks and character. So here is my question: Is this the sort of thing "chief inf