John Stonestreet – Page 50

Uyghur Olympian Lights Torch is China’s “Cynical Move”

Feb 10, 2022John StonestreetChinaChina

As NBC News reported via Twitter, the Chinese Communist Party chose a member of the Uyghur minority to complete the torch relay and deliver the Olympic flame to the opening ceremonies of the winter Olympics.

The Uyghurs are a mostly Muslim ethnic minority in China’s western regions that have been targeted in Chairman Xi Jinping’s nationalistic and totalitarian agenda. Uyghurs are being sent to concentration camps, subjected to systematic rape, forced abortions, and sterilization. By every measure, it’s genocide.

Going into the games, the world already knew that the Uyghurs were being subjected to the same sort of atrocities that defined evil in the last century. The Chinese Communist Party also employs the same sort of propaganda. As CNN’s Jake Tapper put it, it’s “hard to imagine a more cynical move.”

We can’t keep tyrants from being tyrannical, but we can refuse to pretend that what they’re doing is normal. And, we can call on our leaders to do the same. Anything less would be, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it, to live by lies. Something we must never do.

Human Extinction?

Feb 7, 2022John StonestreetEthicsEthics, Life, Sanctity of Human Life

*John Stonestreet, Radio Host and Director of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview*

In a recent essay, Oxford Professor Roger Crisp toyed with the idea that human extinction may not be a bad thing after all. With so much suffering on Earth, he argues, if NASA were to locate a massive asteroid hurtling towards our planet, we would be justified in letting it obliterate us. 

“I am not claiming that extinction would be good;” Crisp clarified, “only that, since it might be, we should devote a lot more attention to thinking about the value of extinction than we have to date.” 

This is an Oxford philosopher of ethics, but he’s wrestling with an idea that long ago left the ivory tower.

Wesley Smith of the Discovery Institute put it this way: “With our supposedly best minds suggesting that human extinction could be desirable, is it any wonder that so many of our young people seem to be despairing?” 

When God is taken out of the moral picture, reason evaporates, as does the rest of our moral logic. Someone tell Bruce Willis and the rest of his team from Armageddon, the mission is off.

Intentionally Empty Churches?

Jan 31, 2022John StonestreetChristianityChristianity, Church, COVID-19

Many churches have shut their doors in the face of Covid, but one large church in Denver hasn’t just shut their doors; they’ve sold them. According to Christianity Today, “The Potter’s House Denver will sell its property in Arapahoe County and continue to worship exclusively online.”

We often hear that because the Church isn’t a building, it doesn’t matter whether it meets in one. But trading in-person worship for an online experience misses what the Church actually is. It isn’t just a place for individual contemplation on “spiritual things.” That’s not the Christianity of the Bible but the pietism of Gnosticism. Embodied worship is an essential part of a Christian worldview.

If our faith is the sort of thing we can live out alone, never needing the presence of others, then are we truly still the Church? The Church is the ecclesia, the called ones, the gathered ones, the community of the saints of God. If we aren’t a “we,” we are not the Church.