Religion and Civic Life

Traditional Easter ham dinner. Top down view table scene on a dark wood background. Ham, scalloped potatoes, vegetables, eggs, hot cross buns and carrot cake.

^{Jay W. Richards
April 3, 2021
Religion and Civic Life}

Easter: Let’s Feast!

_{Jay W. Richards
April 3, 2021
Religion and Civic Life}

I’ve written at length in this series about fasting, but have not said much about feasting. I did that for two reasons. First, few of us know why or we how should fast. And second, if we don’t know why we should fast, we may lose the meaning of feasting as well. Read More ›

^{Scott S. Powell
April 4, 2020
Religion and Civic Life}

America Needs a New Declaration of Equal Justice Under the Law

_{Scott S. Powell
April 4, 2020
Religion and Civic Life}

In prior times of war, crisis, suffering, and loss of life from causes outside the U.S., Americans of both parties would pull together and focus on what can be done to quickly help, alleviate, and solve the problem. No longer. The COVID-19 crisis provides us a window into our national social and spiritual health, and what we see from much of America’s Left as expressed in the media and Democrat Party reveals a degree and strain of moral impoverishment we haven’t seen before. The COVID-19 crisis in America will pass as all such virus epidemics do, but an overriding issue and question that will remain for the American future is: Do we have sufficient courage and determination to successfully deal with the internal threats and contradictions that jeopardize the future viability of the United States and its Constitution? Read More ›

^{Michael Egnor
March 30, 2020
Intelligent Design, Religion and Civic Life}

Are Evangelicals “Crippling” Our Coronavirus Response?

_{Michael Egnor
March 30, 2020
Intelligent Design, Religion and Civic Life}

Evangelicals didn’t cause thus plague, and we desperately need the courage and wisdom that evangelicals have always brought to bear against pandemics. They deserve better than this slander. We would be wise to look closely at the real ideological and scientific “consensus” — a wholly secular consensus — that inflicted this misery on humanity. Read More ›

Close up of female hands touching monitor of mechanical ventilator. Middle aged man lying in hospital bed on blurred background

^{Michael Newton Keas
March 25, 2020
Intelligent Design, Religion and Civic Life}

Medicine, Religion, and Cosmos — Was Andrew Cuomo Wrong to Invoke God?

_{Michael Newton Keas
March 25, 2020
Intelligent Design, Religion and Civic Life}

In a press conference yesterday about the coronavirus, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo used notably religious language. He observed that healthcare workers are “doing God’s work” of caring for people. Was he mistaken in saying so? You might well think so from watching the Cosmos series on Fox and the National Geographic channels. Read More ›

A single cherry tree on top of the rocky mountain

^{John G. West
March 20, 2020
Religion and Civic Life}

Living Amid a Pandemic

_{John G. West
March 20, 2020
Religion and Civic Life}

“Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.” C.S. Lewis It’s been a blissfully sunny week in Seattle — the kind of week Seattleites pine for after their gray and soggy winters. The official start of spring isn’t until today, but the cherry blossoms have already been out for a long time. Of course, it doesn’t Read More ›

^{Michael Egnor
March 19, 2020
Citizen Leadership, Intelligent Design, Religion and Civic Life}

Upstairs into the Plague

_{Michael Egnor
March 19, 2020
Citizen Leadership, Intelligent Design, Religion and Civic Life}

I was driving into work this morning and I hit the traffic jam. Every morning at about 6:30 am the traffic begins to back up on the highway leading into my medical center. It’s the morning shift — hundreds of nurses and clerks and aides and orderlies and housekeepers bleary-eyed and guzzling Starbucks and they wait to enter the parking Read More ›

Delicious roasted whole chicken or turkey on plate with cutlery and sauce , harvest grilled vegetables on dark rustic background, top view, banner, frame. Thanksgiving Day food

^{Jay W. Richards
December 4, 2019
Discovery Institute, Religion and Civic Life}

One Person’s Journey to a Fasting Lifestyle: Week Three

_{Jay W. Richards
December 4, 2019
Discovery Institute, Religion and Civic Life}

In week three of the plan I lay out in the forthcoming Eat, Fast, Feast, fasters limit all of their food intake to four hours a day for at least three days during the week. (The days don’t have to be consecutive.) This is called the 20/4 routine, since you don’t eat for twenty consecutive hours of the day. (This includes sleep time of course.) There’s still no attempt to eat less food during the day than you normally would. At this point, you’re just trying to get your body acclimated to going longer periods without food and using its fat-burning metabolism more effectively. This third week happened to land on Thanksgiving week, so I expected it to be even harder for our volunteer faster. Read More ›

^{Jay W. Richards
November 27, 2019
Religion and Civic Life}

One Person’s Journey to a Fasting Lifestyle: Week Two

_{Jay W. Richards
November 27, 2019
Religion and Civic Life}

In the first week of the six-week plan in my forthcoming book Eat, Fast, Feast, you eat a “ketogenic” diet to get your fat-burning metabolism up and running. This is a physical prerequisite for long-term fasting. In the second week, you begin to limit the amount of time during the day when you eat, starting with sixteen hours off, eight hours on. In other words, you eat all your meals with a single eight-hour time window. A few days ago, I checked in with my friend who volunteered to try out the plan and report his results. Read More ›

^{Jay W. Richards
November 21, 2019
Discovery Institute, Religion and Civic Life}

One Person’s Journey to a Fasting Lifestyle: Week One

_{Jay W. Richards
November 21, 2019
Discovery Institute, Religion and Civic Life}

In my forthcoming book Eat, Fast, Feast (available for pre-order now), I describe a six-week plan to help Christians make fasting a rewarding part of their lives. Most of us don’t really fast. Catholics do residual fasting — an hour before Mass, for instance. And we eat a little less on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. These are really partial abstinences. The harsh truth is that we’ve abandoned the fasting discipline that defined most of Christian history and replaced it with excuses. Some evangelicals and evangelical churches fast, but it’s not anchored in the calendar or long-standing practice. So, it tends to go in and out of fashion, rather than becoming a permanent spiritual practice. Really the only Christian communities that have retained serious fasting are the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Rite churches. They have something to teach the rest of us. Read More ›

^{David Klinghoffer
October 19, 2009
Religion and Civic Life}

Book Review: Why Are Jews Liberals? by Norman Podhoretz

_{David Klinghoffer
October 19, 2009
Religion and Civic Life}

Getting on the freeway the other morning on the way to the office, I noticed the car ahead of me had a Barack Obama ’08 sticker on its bumper. While that’s nothing unusual here in Seattle—it’s practically required—this sticker caught my eye. It was in Hebrew. Guessing that the other car must belong to a neighbor or near-neighbor, I was Read More ›