Dr Paul Allen

There is no doubt that recent times have seen a number of disasters. Just over a week ago, the world witnessed a semi-rare three hurricanes simultaneously in the Atlantic basin . Houston has experienced  three “500 year flood events”  in the past few years. Having dropped about 52 inches of rain locally and  nine trillion tons of water , Harvey is considered a  “1000 year or more” event . Irma is still deluging the States after  devastating entire islands . While Americans were thus occupied,  monsoon-related flooding in Asia   exceeded the deaths, damaged, and displaced of the States . Water wasn’t the only carnaging culprit. Wildfires in Washington, Oregon, California , Montana , Idaho, California, and Utah  brought unexpected havoc to the west . We could go on about wars, rumors of wars, and other mayhem. Your co-worker philosopher is right: things  are  happening. But the question is, what? Many have postulated....

Anniversary of Roe v. Wade (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) It is hard to fully comprehend how deluded our political and legal culture is over the issue of abortion. The United States in many ways has become a culture of death—a culture that embraces a mother’s murder of a child as a right, and then defends that right at all costs and against all logic. Here are three examples of that. Colorado —where murdering a baby is not crime: Last month a pregnant woman was attacked by a stranger, and her baby was cut out of her womb. The details to the crime are horrific ( here is the CNN story , which is graphic and will not easily get out of your mind). The mom was in her eighth month of pregnancy, her baby was named Aurora, and Aurora did not survive. Prosecutors in Colorado were considering charging the attacker with murder for Aurora’s death, but they came under intense political pressure from “women’s rights” groups not to, just as the media came under pressure to not use Auror...

Every year, thousands of Christian books are published worldwide. Of those thousands, there are usually only a small handful that are worth reading. Of those that are worth reading, there are only a few that are worth reading repeatedly. David Holwerda's Jesus & Israel: One Covenant or Two ? is one of those rare few. The basic purpose of Holwerda's book is to examine the topic of promise and fulfillment in Scripture from a Reformed, covenantal perspective. In order to thoroughly deal with this significant topic, each chapter of the book is devoted to addressing one specific issue that sheds light on the relationship between Jesus and Israel . The topics that are addressed include, for example, the temple, the land, and the law. Though not an explicitly stated purpose of the book, the examination of these issues from a covenantal perspective also provides a very helpful contrast with the popular dispensationalist ideas of promise and fulfillment. The first chapter of the...

Image via Wikipedia The Henry Doorly Zoo in Nebraska had on display three live female bonnethead sharks . The bonnethead is quite attractive in a lethal hammerhead kind of way. But no matter how attractive these three ladies were, none of them had ever been on a date. You see they lived in a tank, in a zoo. The closest male sharks were, well, unavailable. Sharks, like chickens, can produce unfertilized eggs and sometimes do so perhaps in silent protest at not being allowed to date. But one day the protest became a bit more pronounced when, on 14 Dec 2001, one of these broody sharks went into labor and out popped a baby girl bonnethead shark (yup hammerheads have live birth). Everyone with a 5 th  grade biology class under their belt, including all th Image via Wikipedia e world-renowned marine biologists , stood with their collective mouths agape. This, to put it mildly, was new. A virgin shark, who had never as much as held hands with a male, producing offspring. Though ...