Jason Thacker's Blog, page 6

How reading widely can strengthen your beliefs

Amidst the constant distractions and shallowness on social media, reading a book can serve as a reprieve from the onslaught of information and as a way to challenge yourself to go deeper than 280 characters. Social media draws us in because it leads us to think we are staying connected with others, keeping up with what is going on around the world, and often takes less concentration than picking up a book. But these tools are constantly discipling us to seek expediency over the long process of l...

Free to Tweet? Content Moderation, Religious Freedom, and the Digital Public Square

“If religious freedom is advocated only for pragmatic reasons, it can and will be sacrificed to expediency.” Those words, spoken in 1983 by the late evangelical theologian and ethicist Carl F. H. Henry, were prophetic. They foreshadowed much of what was to come after his death in 2003 as a new digital epoch unfolded, marked by the meteoric rise of social media as one of society’s main communication conduits. And while traditional threats to religious freedom and free expression are still unnervi...

The Sexual Revolution, the modern self, and cultural engagement

This is a transcription of the Digital Public Square podcast interview with Dr. Carl Trueman. Subscribe in your favorite podcast app to get new episodes each Monday morning or listen online.

JASON THACKER: Dr. Trueman, thank you so much for joining us here on the podcast. As we get started, can you tell us a little bit about your background and why you decided to write this book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self as a church historian?

DR. TRUEMAN: I was a classicist as an underg...

On the need for intellectual inquiry

A few weeks ago in the Supreme court nomination hearings, Senator Marsha Blackburn (TN-R) asked a question to then Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to define what the term woman means, to which the judge responded that she was not a biologist and could not answer the question. Political theater in the age of televised hearings and social media soundbites aside, this type of question has a clear answer given our common sense understanding of what it means to be biologically a man or woman, as well as ...

How false notions of moral autonomy scrambled American parenting

Meta’s new safety tools for Instagram rolled out earlier this month, and they’ll become available in the Family Center for other apps, including Facebook, and the popular Oculus virtual reality headsets later this year. Parents of younger users — in theory, this means teenagers over 13, which is Meta’s minimum user age, but in practice it includes younger kids, too — will be able to monitor and limit their children’s content choices and app time.

That might seem like unqualified good news giv...

How do we disciple our kids during the sexual revolution?

Early last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (Rep.) signed a bill into law that bars instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through the third grade. This bill, which has been dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by opponents, has brought about intense national controversy. This is due, in large part, to the prominent role that sexuality and gender identity play in today’s cultural conversations, as well as the influence of the LGBTQ+ movement in all aspects of our society...

Why Christians Should Care about Artificial Intelligence

When most of us think about artificial intelligence (AI), we tend to think of the devastating effects of automation in the workforce or even about how these tools might affect our families. The ethical questions surrounding AI are countless and complex. They demand the church’s attention today because these decisions are not made in a vacuum. AI affects our communities and, most importantly, people created in the very image of God.

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

AI technologies are driving...

How Christians can think about the epidemic of online gambling and sports betting

I am an avid college basketball fan. During my college years at the University of Tennessee, our basketball program took major steps forward in being competitive each year, routinely making the NCAA tournament. I follow my team and interact with various sports accounts on social media, which has put me in the target audience for many marketers including most sports betting apps and other forms of online gambling. These companies routinely target younger to middle-aged men, especially those who s...

Why the Christian ethic isn’t simply about rules

Often when Christians (and even non-Christians) speak about biblical ethics, we tend to focus on the rules that Scripture gives us. For example, we think of the Ten Commandments in which the second half begins with “you shall not _______.” Whether it’s about murder, adultery, stealing, bearing false witness, or covetessness, we tend to relegate the Chrisitan ethic to a set of moral rules by which we are to live. This type of ethical system is known as deontology, where ethics is a set of rules, ...

Thomas F. Torrance on the nature of evil

Last week in this newsletter, I highlighted an article I wrote at ERLC entitled “What the horrors of war teach us about the nature of morality”, which focused on the objective and innate understanding of good and evil on display with the widespread solidarity that the world has shown in support of the Ukrainian people in this time of war. The response to this unjustified war reminds us that as created and dependent beings, we simply can not avoid using the objective moral language of good and ev...