During the first 13 centuries after the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, no one thought of setting up a creche to celebrate Christmas. The pre-eminent Christian holiday was Easter, not Christmas.

The word 'tolerance' once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate.

Americans have grown impatient with the relentless politicizing of every area of life.

We need to understand enough of modern thought to identify the ways it blocks us from living out the Gospel the way God intends, both in terms of intellectual roadblocks and in terms of economic and structural changes that make it harder to live by Scriptural principles.

The gospel is like a caged lion,' said the great baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. 'It does not need to be defended, it simply needs to be let out of it's cage' Today, the cage is our accommodation to the secular/sacred split that reduces Christianity to a matter of personal belief. To unlock the cage, we need to become utterly convinced that, as Francis Schaeffer said, Christianity is not merely religious truth, it is total truth- truth about the whole of reality.

The loss of objectivity in moral thought does not lead to liberation. It leads to oppression. Secular ideologies preach liberty, but they practice tyranny.

The more we learn about life, the less plausible is any evolutionary theory that relies on blind, undirected, piece-by-piece change.