Compassion didn’t come out of nowhere. It came to the world from God and His incarnate Son. Mercy is not to be found in Christless world. The standards of a fallen humanity include hardness of heart, cruelty, and malice. The Bible, on the other hand, is a treasure of compassion, as
Category: Compassion
Total 40 Posts
In two recent posts, (Compassion, the Noun That Used to be a Verb and Mom’s Compassion is Like God … and So is Dad’s) we examined some of the Bible’s key vocabulary about compassion. God himself is the author of compassion. If we are serious about compassion, we must understand
Our recent post, COMPASSION: The Noun That Used to Be a Verb, introduced some of the rich biblical vocabulary behind the English terms “compassion” and “social justice.” Why should we bother to study the biblical vocabulary? Because compassion is central to our faith, and comes from God’s heart. Yet it
Atheism provides no basis for compassion and social justice. “Atheist compassion” is an oxymoron (a statement that contradicts itself, like “jumbo shrimp.”) That is not to say that atheists are never compassionate; they often are. But their compassion is not driven by their philosophy. The natural end of atheistic thought is social
Welfare instead of wealth creation is the legacy of atheism in the West. The populations of the world [will] increase in geometric proportions while the food resources available for them [will] increase only in arithmetic proportions. That famous prediction, from a book titled An Essay on the Principles of Population, missed
The rise of atheistic evolution in the West did not leave our practice of compassion unscathed. Many readers will remember seeing something like this graphic during their public school experience. It’s meant to show the evolution of the horse. But the effects of teaching evolution are far greater than memories of childhood school
It is a truism that we build societies in the image of the God we worship. The Psalmist put it this way: 15 The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands. 16 They have mouths, but do not speak; they have eyes, but do not
As a country pursues a shift in worldview, language and culture will change as well. These changes then lead to a shift in policies and practices of compassion. This process can be pictured as Paradigm → Principles → Policies → Program. In the last 200 years the worldview in the
“Compassion” has become one of a growing number of politicized words (like ‘access’ or ‘diversity’) whose meaning has been corrupted beyond redemption. So writes Thomas Sowell the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution of Stanford University. While I would agree with Sowell that the word has
When I was in college I read Dr. Karl Menninger’s book Whatever Became of Sin? Menninger was one of the world’s leading psychiatrists and founder of the world-famous Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. He wrote the book because he became convinced that mental health was connected to moral health. He
