The fascists and other totalitarians of the twentieth century didn’t treat opponents as wrong but as dangerous. Thus, they felt they did not need to be debated but eradicated.  Such a mindset is how you rack up a body count in the tens of millions.

Where was the church during the reigns of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Castro and Pol Pot? In his powerful little book How Do You Kill 11 Million People?: Why the Truth Matters More Than You Think, Andy Andrews tells the story of a church which sat next to a set of railroad tracks.  When a train packed with Jews. gypsies and fellow Christians like Bonhoeffer passed by, the church would sing their hymns louder to avoid hearing the cries of those speeding toward their deaths.  The church was silent as first the culture filled with true intolerance and continued in silence as hate filled leaders fed off the culture to rise to power.

I’ve been reading Alister McGrath’s excellent new book If I Had Lunch with C.S. Lewis (Tyndale 2014).  Professor McGrath writes that one of the reasons Lewis moved from atheism to Christianity was that the latter provided a much more comprehensive and consistent worldview than the former.

There are numerous intellectual reasons to reject atheism and embrace Christianity and the scope of one’s worldview is only one of them.  So, Please don’t misunderstand me.  I am not saying that the following is THE knock out punch for faith in Jesus but it is one of the arguments that one may look to for choosing Christianity over atheism.  All that being said, here we go:

I went to boarding school with two young men who were devout Muslims and whose father helped lead the Algerian revolt against France.  I used to smoke cigs with them after ordering a half pepperoni-half cheese pizza from the local Dominos in San Marino, California.  We were good friends but I had no idea what they believed or why.

I really liked the movie God’s Not Dead and not just because it was inspired by the work of my longtime employer Alliance Defending Freedom (a Christian legal ministry that along with shutting down Planned Parenthood clinics also protects Christians and Christian groups on campuses) as well as the fine book by Rice Broocks but because it presents real challenges and real answers.  Apologetics (and the freedom to engage in it) is not a luxury but a necessity on university campuses.  The battle for the hearts and minds of young people begins with the mind and although there is an embarrassment of apologetic riches out there for Christians to mine, the film God’s Not Dead is a great place to start.

While every other person in America was trying to figure our why the rest of the world loves soccer so much, I was compiling the Three Things You Need to Read this Week: