Dr Paul Allen

It has been a good term for religious freedom at the U.S. Supreme Court, and predictably, LGBT activists are outraged. Their anger, however, reveals how far their crusade to hijack public education has gone and how necessary judicial pushback has become.  Exhibit A is Mahmoud v. Taylor, considered a key test case for parental rights – a concept that many LGBT activists reject entirely. The case centred around Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, which had introduced LGBT books into the pre-kindergarten through Grade 5 curriculum, and, in March 2023, eliminated a policy allowing parents to opt their children out of LGBT lessons.  Led by Tamer Mahmoud, a group of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish families sued the school board generally and Superintendent Thomas Taylor specifically, saying that their First Amendment right to the exercise of religion was being violated because their families were being forcibly exposed to content that directly conflicted with their religious...

Since I’ve spent the majority of my professional career as a teacher of Scripture, philosophy, and theology, I’ve often had the opportunity to think about matters of pedagogy and other issues related to instruction.  One thing that’s always struck me as I have considered what it means to be an effective teacher is that most of the great teachers in history were themselves students of other great instructors.  Socrates taught Plato; Plato taught Aristotle, and Aristotle taught Alexander the Great. The entire history of Western ideas has been affected by these four men. In theology, we see that Ambrose of Milan taught Augustine, and Augustine, through his writings, taught both Martin Luther and John Calvin. We owe a great debt to Ambrose, who by discipline Augustine got the ball rolling for the Reformation, in a manner of speaking. That great teachers produce other great teachers tells us that we can’t take the search for a teacher lightly. In fact, our choices of the instructor...