Why We Shouldn’t Label People

In an over-polarized era, labels abound. Liberal, RINO, socialist, neo-con, Nazi, Marxist, racist—all these and more aren’t meant to be descriptive but dismissive. Especially when we assign the additional labels of good or evil to people. Labels shut down discussion. We use them to put people—who at that...

If An Evil Person Does a Good Thing, Is It Good or Evil?

“Whoever is not with me is against me.” “Whoever is not against us is for us.” Jesus made both of these statements, and they aren’t different ways of saying the same thing. The first, from Matthew 12:20, restricts the number of people who are for Jesus to those who are with him. If you aren’t specifically...

Getting Past Perfect

A couple of years ago I surprised Pam by taking her to one of those do-it-yourself painting studios. This particular session was “Paint Your Pet” I had emailed them a couple of pictures of our beagle Kobi, which they sketched in pencil on a canvas. The instructors showed us how to mix the acrylic paints to...

Good and Evil and the Untrained Eye

In Matthew 13 Jesus tells a parable about a man with a wheat field. During the night, some guy with a really, really bad attitude snuck in and sowed some weeds among the wheat. Which is interesting because weeds are the kind of things that don’t need sowing. They just appear. But these aren’t ordinary...

The List

In Galatians 5:22-23 Paul lists what he calls “the fruit of the Spirit”: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity…wait, stop right there. Look it up in your Bible, and it probably doesn’t say “generosity”, it probably says “goodness”. That’s what the King James says, as does every other translation...