What can an ordinary person like me do to help the poor?" When people find out at parties and social gatherings that I am a development economist (and yes, we economists do attend such events), often they ask me this question. For a long time my response was the same: "Perhaps sponsor a child?"

You may not have noticed, but it seems a lot of people have stopped showing up on time at your church. Maybe you’re one of them. Which might explain why you haven’t noticed.

Christians must never respond to Muslims out of fear, hatred, or anger. In fact, the church in the West should view the coming of Muslim immigrants as an opportunity for the spread of the gospel in communities that have never been exposed to the gospel before. God is bringing the mission field to our doorsteps. Instead of fearing, we should rejoice that we live in a free country and can present the gospel with love, humility, and respect to our Muslim neighbors without any fear of persecution by an Islamic regime.

Abortion is not a comfortable subject for either the religious or nonreligious among us and two respected people, looking at identical information, often reach opposite opinions on the matter. But with the debate over abortion rights again getting national attention after the trial and conviction of Dr. Kermit Gosnell for the killing of three babies who had already been born in his clinic, it is worth asking: Why is it that some people of faith are in favor of abortion rights, while other people of faith are against them?

No one doubts that there are significant economic forces pushing parents to invest so heavily in their children's outcome from an early age. But taking all the discomfort, disappointment and even the play out of development, especially while increasing pressure for success, turns out to be misguided by just about 180 degrees. With few challenges all their own, kids are unable to forge their creative adaptations to the normal vicissitudes of life. That not only makes them risk-averse, it makes them psychologically fragile, riddled with anxiety.

There is a sense of course in which only God is our home. What was it that St. Augustine said— ‘we are restless until we find our rest in thee’. Maybe God meant it to be that way. Maybe he didn’t want us to get too comfortable in just one spot on earth, lest we forget he is the ultimate source of comfort— the Comforter. Maybe the image of God in each one of us is a homing signal… calling us back home to God.

When the chaos of sin engages one's soul, anxiety naturally follows. The word translated anxiety in Philippians 4:6 comes from the Greek word merimnao. It gathers meaning from the words merizo "to divide" and nous "mind." This divided mind is the unhappy condition of the man whom the Apostle James describes as "double-minded, unstable in all his ways" (1:8). Such instability routinely focuses on the object of anxiety to the exclusion of God.

I worry that this Christian college version of The Bachelor has too many young women focused on finding their mister, at the sacrifice of the academic, spiritual, and personal development that the undergrad years are meant to bring. Many young women admit restraining their personalities, talents, interests, and the display of their intellect—basically playing the part of the fool—just to increase their chances of snagging a mate.

The single person’s struggles matter very much to God in his sparrow-cherishing, sheep-pursuing mercy, but not so very much to society, at least not in obvious ways. So long as marriage retains its institutional vitality, it will always bear the greater share of interest for storytellers because its participants have—more visibly than anyone else—one foot planted in the world of necessity and the other in eternity.

In a scene from Jurassic Park, Ian Malcolm, the mathematician skeptical about whether the park is a good idea, watches the T-Rex burst out of its enclosure and says, "I hate being right all the time." Princeton Professor Robert George and other defenders of traditional marriage understand these sentiments. For years, they've warned that redefining marriage beyond the union of one man and one woman wouldn't-indeed couldn't-stop with same-sex unions. The same reasoning that extends marriage to same-sex couples would easily be applied to polygamy and polyamory also.