Holy Barbarians: The Push for Nationalized Academic Standards
“The time has come for a serious consideration of national academic standards,” says the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten.
“A coalition of education leaders, advocacy groups, and teachers’ unions is pushing for the development of nationalized common academic standards,” reports U. S. News & World Report.
The plan, warns the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), is “to potentially eliminate virtually all state control over the education system and centralize education in Washington, D. C., through nationalized standards, which would lead to nationalized curriculum, tests, and textbooks.”
What’s it all about? Does Congress intend for federal bureaucrats to impose a “one-size-fits-all” public education regime on all fifty states, covering thousands of local school districts? Will the feds be content to micromanage public education, or will they try to corral Christian schools and family homeschools, too? Read the rest of this article...
The Woman of the House: A Covenantal Voice of Victory
When I was a young girl, I would spend a lot of time daydreaming about my future. With a bent for acting, I would envision myself as one of the five nominees for an Academy Award. Interestingly, I never pictured myself winning the award for “Best Actress.” Rather, I always was the proud recipient of the “Best Supporting Actress” award. I liked the idea of being in a supporting role, that character that enhanced the main actor’s performance. In the many plays and musicals I participated in during high school, I quickly learned that my greatest satisfaction did not come from holding “center stage.” I was drawn to the role of director or producer—the person who worked behind the scenes to manage and assist others in their performances.
I assumed that these were preferences peculiar to me as an individual. But after becoming a student of the Bible, I realized that these attributes were a major aspect of God’s original design of women in their participation in the dominion mandate. Eve was given to Adam to assist him in his calling under God and to help him in a supportive role, not take center stage. When Adam described Eve as bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh, he was responding to the most perfect gift he could imagine—a counterpart who completed him and strengthened him in the work God called him to do. Read the rest of this article...
Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem. (Matt. 2:1)
The Enlightenment represented a major shift in man’s thinking about himself. It was a return to a non-Christian view of man as a being controlled by reason. The medieval position was Christian in its view that man was faith-driven: that is, man’s thought is controlled by what he assumes is true.
What man assumes or believes may be true or untrue, but once he believes it to be fact, it is hard for him to let go—his assumption or his belief that something is true causes him to treat it as fact. Once such a fact becomes so widely accepted among many men that it is never doubted, it becomes a “truism.” Read the rest of this article...
To do righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice. 
—Proverbs 21:3
I wish I could report to you today that the church of the Lord Jesus Christ is embracing and acting on its primary calling to restore justice to a world pervasively framed in unrighteousness. I cannot. And if my email inbox is any indication, the central questions on the heart of the average Christian still focus on how to celebrate the Sabbath; what church should he attend; can he eat pork; and who was the man of lawlessness in Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians. Unless we’re talking about unjust taxation, justice and judgment are far from his mind.
Yet Solomon wrote that “to do righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice,” and this he said hundreds of years prior to the cross of Jesus Christ. In other words, he was still living in the time of sacrifice, priesthood, and holy days, but like his father, David, Solomon saw past the elaborate—and God-commanded—liturgy of his time. He understood that the ultimate expression of worship was a world restored to justice and righteous judgment. Read the rest of this article...
