Utah still has a “keep sweet” problem — “Politeness doesn’t care about morality, and vice versa. If a Nazi is polite, does that change anything about Nazism or the horrors of Nazism? No. It changes nothing, and this nothing is the very hallmark of politeness. A virtue of pure form, of etiquette and ceremony! A show of virtue…

One evening at a church event some years ago, I was cornered by a leader in my congregation who wanted my advice. My spouse had led a lesson for the women at church and in the process made some of them uncomfortable. Why were these women uncomfortable? It wasn’t clear…

“More and more I could see a gap between what I had learned in Sunday school and what I was learning in college.” — Martin Luther King, Jr. went to college at the young age of 15 and was immediately enthralled with the conversations he encountered there. “My days in college were very exciting ones,” he writes. “There was a free atmosphere.” It was there he found Henry David Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience…

Too many are falling prey to conspirituality — Ram Dass, famed author of Be Here Now, fell for a con-artist. It was the early 1970s, and Dass longed for a new spiritual instructor after his former guru named Maharaj-ji passed away. One day a friend took him to the basement of her Brooklyn home to meet a woman…

In his book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Facebook investor Peter Thiel argues that founders should build startups that are so innovative they don’t have competitors. It’s best, as the title indicates, to go from zero (nothing) to one (something original). If you…

Forget a future “solemn separation.” Choose each other now. — Heaven is broken, at least as it’s currently envisioned by many Christians around the world. We could look at any number of denominational creeds to see why. …