Today, I’m just going to briefly highlight a few things I read and have been saving to share. The first takes us back to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which was such terrible news several months ago. The time since hasn’t been any kinder to the events in question, as it’s only revealed more about how little action was taken to stop the violence. The article I read, on The Shame of Uvalde, discusses in part how the event highlighted a real lack of courage from those involved – but perhaps more importantly, a lack of love:

At the root of a failure of courage is often a failure of love. C.S. Lewis wrote that courage is “not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” Jesus said, “No one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for his friends.” What we witnessed from the police in Uvalde was the triumph of self-love over love of others, including of the young kids bleeding in that room.

At the testing point, the officers were confronted with a question, “Whom do you love?”

“I love me,” they responded, and they stood down.

The post was partly in honor of Memorial Day, and noted the importance of recognizing those who loved enough to pay the ultimate sacrifice – most importantly, Jesus, but also all those who gave their lives for others, including in our armed services. It concluded:

Our nation still produces such men and women, and one way to continue to cultivate courage is to remember them, honor them, and teach the next generation to emulate them. Yes, condemn cowardice, but also celebrate valor. Remind our nation that its heroes made a better choice… Our nation is sustained by sacrifice. It is strained and stained by cowardice. May the shame of Uvalde shake us from our national malaise. May the memory of our fallen call us back to our highest ideals. And may God have mercy on us all.

On homeschooling and whether all Christians should homeschooling

Tim Challies had a recent article from his daughter on public school vs homecshool; she attended public school and addresses the pros and cons. Though brief, I thought it was insightful and helpful and points out – from someone who did well in the public school system – how the challenges there for Christians keep getting worse, noting that she might make a different choice for her own children given cultural trends. I think it’s worth reading – not because it answers the question about what Christians ought to do, but because it raises questions Christians should wrestle with.

I shared this article on social media, and a friend passed along links to two articles from a Biblical perspective laying out the responsibility of Christians in their children’s education. I largely agree with the principles laid out in these two articles, though they are also a little too firmly in the “all Christians should homeschool” camp for my taste; that is, they are too prescriptive. My position is more that “all Christian parents should wrestle with their God-given responsibility to train their children, and decide prayerfully and carefully how best to fulfill this responsibility out of reverence for God”. But with that caveat, I think these articles are worth reading:

While Maura and I homeschool our children, and are delighted to do so as we see it as the way we can best train our children, we also have good Christian friends who make different choices in this regard for very good reasons. We don’t think all Christian parents should homeschool – just that all Christian parents should carefully consider how best to serve God in this area of life, as in every other area.

Views of the Constitution

A while back, I read this interesting article about how recent Supreme Court decisions reflect two competing views of the Constitution and I thought it was helpful. A number of split decisions reflect two competing views – one of the Constitution as an authoritative document which gives courts a set of narrow, well-defined responsibilities, and one which views the Constitution as largely obsolete and sees the role of the courts as to implement a certain social vision. Once these competing visions are clear, it’s easy to understand much of the written argument. The article is worth reading.

The Supreme Court and religious liberty in Maine

Speaking of the Supreme Court, I also enjoyed Al Mohler’s perspective on the June decision regarding free exercise of religion in education in Maine. In particular, parents in rural areas in Maine were given the opportunity to use public funds to send their children to private schools, as long as those schools were not religious. The Supreme Court ruled (rightly in my view) that this violated the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution – that is, the clause protecting people’s rights to freely exercise their religion.

The issue here was that many interpret the Establishment Clause – the one which prevents the state from establishing a state religion – to mean that state funds can’t be used for religious instruction. However, in Maine, state funds were allowed to be used for any kind of instruction at all as long as it wasn’t religious. So you could say it was almost a state-required atheism. Mohler notes that the state had essentially been telling parents, “You can pick any school you want as long as it’s not religious,” which is explicitly discriminating against religion.

Mohler said (it’s a transcript, so a bit awkward):

But what we have seen in recent years is that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has said, “Look, the door has swung far too [wide] at the expense of the free exercise of religion. This Court, and America’s increasingly secular society at large has been so resistant, indeed, allergic to the idea that government could be entangled in any way with religion that it is singled out religion for negative treatment.” And as the Court’s majority said in this case, that is the one thing government may not do.

The court, he says, ended up concluding essentially that one can’t justify a policy that says “You can choose anything except the religious option.” Yes, the state can’t teach or enforce a religion – but people are still free to live out their faith, even when it comes to picking what school they send their children to. In Mohler’s words, “If the state does have this program, it can’t discriminate against religious parents.” I think this was an excellent decision, and it’s important that we begin to restore people’s rights to freely exercise their religion in situations like this.