Like many others this week, I watched with some interest Miss South Carolina Teen, Caitlin Upton’s response to the question, Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?

It was one of those simultaneously humorous and painful moments as she responded:

“I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, um, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future.”

I understand that Miss Upton was on MSNBC on Tuesday evening and has demonstrated a good sense of humor about this as she explained what happened. (more…)

Last week I mentioned that CNN had a special series airing this week titled God’s Warriors which began Tuesday night with “Jewish Warriors,” Wednesday night aired “Muslim Warriors” and tonight will be “Christian Warriors.” On Friday, August 17th I received an email from one of CNN’s PR people, Jennifer Dargan. She extended an invitation to preview three segments of the 3 part series, formulate and email questions for the host, Christiane Amanpour. Early on Tuesday morning there was a special invitation only internet broadcast where Christiane responded to the questions that various bloggers including MCOI had submitted. One of the most interesting and revealing comments she made during that time was: (more…)

Many of you are aware that our current Journal article “Who Will Be First in the Kingdom?” has received enough interest that we put the Journal online earlier than usual. We have recently received a letter from Bob Renaud at Vision Forum Ministries answering the questions we had asked in January. Within a few days of that we received a letter from Pastor Brian Abshire, the author of “Biblical Patriarchy and the Doctrine of Federal Representation” one of the articles we quoted from on the Vision Forum website. Pastor Abshire also called last week (just as I had hit the send button with an email acknowledging receipt of his letter). I found him to be kind and enjoyed our visit by phone. I won’t be responding to his letter at any length in this blog piece but (more…)

Apparently there are a lot of people really, really interested in why people have sex. So much so that there was a survey done titled 237 Reasons We Have Sex . Of about 2500 college students and the question asked was why have sex? Both men and women agreed on the top reasons for having sex: 1) they were attracted to the person, 2) they wanted to experience physical pleasure and 3) “it feels good,” according to a peer-reviewed study in the August edition of Archives of Sexual Behavior. Twenty of the top 25 reasons given for having sex were the same for both men and women. Sure expressing love and affection were in the top ten for both but were beaten out by the number one reason: “I was attracted to the person.”

Now when I heard these statistics, I could have engaged in the venerable evangelical pastime of ranting about how the culture (more…)

I recall hearing the statement years ago, “Five years from now you will be the same person you are today except for the books you read and the people you meet.” There is a great deal of truth to that claim. The people we meet and the books we read influence our thinking a great deal. As part of our ongoing research we spend a fair amount of time reading. Not only does this include material by the various groups we are researching but new material by Christian publishers as well. We typically can put a review or two in the printed Journal but it occurred to me that we can put more reviews and post them more frequently in on the blog. That will help me because the reviews are beginning to stack up and it will answer a question that I am asked fairly often, (more…)