Today, TGC carries my response to those who complained about how I used the term “justice” in my last TGC article:

Although murder and theft are often focal points (and understandably so!) when Scripture describes justice, it also associates justice with a broader set of duties, including generosity: “He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing” (Deut. 10:18); “Blessed are they who observe justice, who do righteousness at all times!” (Ps. 106:3); “It is well with the man who deals generously and lends; who conducts his affairs with justice” (Ps. 112:5).

In his song of praise, Moses declares of God: “The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice” (Deut. 32:4). Does “all his ways” include only promise-keeping and debt-paying?

I argue that the church’s gospel witness requires it to have a vision of justice and relate that vision to the gospel:

The gospel call to repent from sin and follow Jesus with our whole lives is meaningless without such a vision. What is sin? What is repentance? We cannot answer if we cannot say what justice is.

As always, whatever you think, your comments are greatly appreciated!

Over on The Green Room I have a new post in my series on suffering and work appreciating Martin Luther King’s perspective on connecting faith to labor, and evaluating his statement that “unearned suffering is redemptive”:

Suffering is the telltale mark of the fallen cosmos. We all bear that mark in ourselves. Just as Elihu said to Job, our suffering is God’s declaration to us that we and our world are not all right; we need him to transform us and our world.

But Paul says [in Romans 8] salvation transforms our suffering. It becomes eschatological. The same suffering that is, in all people, a mark of our need for redemption becomes, in the redeemed, a mark of God’s promise of salvation. We suffer, but not as those without hope; our suffering no longer says merely “you need God to come,” but “God is still coming for you!”

As always, your comments are welcome!

Today TGC carries my article on why workplaces provide our best opportunity to influence culture:

Right now, many Christian efforts to “engage culture” or “contextualize the gospel” are focused on things like influencing elections or making Hollywood movies. It is very important for us to promote justice and beauty, simply because God loves those things, but politics and art alone cannot produce broader cultural impact. By themselves, they are incomplete pieces of the cultural whole. Daily work is where most people experience their cultures in its wholeness.

Consider joining us at the 2016 Faith@Work Summit this October 27-29 in Dallas! It’s the largest gathering of leaders in the faith and work movement, and we’ve been working hard to put together a fruitful program of speakers, breakouts and networking opportunities. Early bird discount ends Sept. 1!

EdChoice has posted Part 2 of my series on how to design education systems for a pluralistic society. In this part, I focus on how we don’t have a theory of education for a pluralistic society, yet somehow we manage to educate anyway:

It is striking that our society has practiced exactly this kind of pluralistic education for a very long time even though we have few publicly discussed ideas about what pluralistic education is or how it works. This should make us humble about the importance of theory. We’ve all heard plenty of funny anecdotes where the joke is that some cockamamie scheme “works in theory.” A friend of mine reports that in college, he actually heard a classmate exclaim, with heartfelt sincerity: “Dammit, communism works in theory!”

Education in a free society doesn’t “work in theory,” because we don’t have a theory that explains it. Yet somehow – though the status quo is very imperfect – we manage to do it anyway:

The fact that education is taking place in a pluralistic society is revealing. We are not as divided as we think. Our differences do not go all the way down. Our sense of absolute difference from one another, our sense of being locked in perpetual religious and moral wars with one another, is why pluralistic education “doesn’t work in theory.” Yet it works, however imperfectly, in practice. We are not as different as we may think, and our schools prove it.

Tolerance and consensus tend to emerge in local community. Nationally, we are divided. On talk shows and Twitter, we are divided. But we are more able to find common ground in the midst of our differences if we are dealing with people whom we know and who live in the same environment we do.

The stresses and strains we experience as we work amidst our differences are not always bad signs. Often, they’re good ones:

It is very hard to live with difference, much harder than we want to believe—a fact brilliantly explored in the recent movie Zootopia. We often get into conflict with each other. Deficiencies of goodwill are exposed. But this is what the process of building tolerance and consensus involves. These frictions are not signs that the process is not happening; they are the process itself. Experiencing social conflict over our differences is not the first step toward killing each other over them; it is the alternative to doing so.

As always, your thoughts are very welcome!

After a morning spent trying to carefully find a little bit of measured criticism of New Atlantis number 50, I think I want to tentatively suggest that the recommended reading strategy here, which I intend to continue to develop as time permits, is to read this study

alongside the New Atlantis study.

And, yes, it would be more correct to call both of these “review” or “meta-analysis” articles, insofar as “study” is often understood to involve fresh empirical results, which neither of these deliver.

It seems important to me that we recognize the severe limitations of social science methodology, and that we recognize just as clearly that there are indeed empirically testable hypotheses involved in conversations about sex and sexuality.  I think that the Bailey et al study, which does not necessarily agree at all points with the New Atlantis study, suggests enough clear points of difference from the popularized forms of gender ideology that even a very parsimonious reading of the claims of both studies obligates honest intellectuals to stop repeating much of the slop that many a textbook and faculty workshop treat as dogma.