400-408 – Jonathan Morrow, founder of thinkchristianly.org, was the student discipleship coordinator at Biola, then later a spiritual formation & leadership fellow at the Howard Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary, who's today the equipping pastor at Fellowship Bible Church (fbcrc.org). He's the author of several books: Is God Just a Human Invention?: And Seventeen Other Questions Raised by the New Atheists (Amazon), Welcome to College: A Christ-follower's Guide for the Journey (Amazon), including his latest Think Christianly: Looking at the Intersection of Faith and Culture (Amazon), and contributed the chapter "Introducing Spiritual Formation" to Foundations of Spiritual Formation: A Community Approach to Becoming Like Christ (Amazon).
413-423 – Jonathan Morrow, What is the Kalam Cosmological Argument? The beginning of the universe was caused by a creative agent.
428-438 – Jonathan Morrow, What can we know about this creative Agent? (The teleological arguments, and the anthropological arguments.)
443-452 – Jonathan Morrow,
458-508 – Tim Muehlhoff, is an Associate Professor of Communication at Biola, and author of Marriage Forecasting: Changing the Climate of Your Relationship One Conversation at a Time (Amazon), and Authentic Communication: Christian Speech Engaging Culture (Christian Worldview Integration) (Amazon). He and his wife Noreen are frequent speakers at marriage conferences. Today we talk about how Hollywood is killing romance, and Five Ways to Keep Romance Alive after Valentine's Day.
508 – Download a free Daily Devotional from your favorite KKLA teacher by clicking Program Guide at kkla.com.
512-523 – Tim Muehlhoff, Re marriage, as Steven Covey wrote, the first habit is to begin with the end in mind – What is the purpose of marriage?
528-539 – Tim Muehlhoff, When was the last time you saw a movie or show in which STD's played the role they actually do in reality? When 1 in 4 high school girls have an STD, why is this not presented? Hollywood gets smoking and substance abuse, why not the consequences of promiscuity?
544-554 – Tim Muehlhoff, What about "falling in love?" What is the relationship climate? Involves four elements, trust, acknowledgement, commitment, and expectations.
558-608 – (:40) Adele's Rolling in the Deep off her "21" album won 6 Grammys last night, including the prestigious trifecta of record, song and album of the year. The singer, who also made a triumphant comeback from vocal cord surgery on the Grammy stage, sobbed as she won the night's final award, album of the year, for "21." It was last year's top-selling album with more than six million copies sold and remains lodged at the No. 1 spot on this year's charts. Her victories tied her with Beyonce as the most wins by a woman in one evening.
• Blaze (2/13/2012) NICKI MINAJ PERFORMS AN EXORCISM ON HERSELF, SPEAKS IN TONGUES & LEVITATES DURING GRAMMY PERFORMANCE.
• CBS (2/13/2012) Catholic League Blasts Rapper's Grammy Performance, Asking 'Is Nicki Minaj Possessed?'
612-623 – (Exorcist Theme) The reality of spiritual warfare and demon possession.
628-639 – (:40) ([6] Obama on Contraception Deal) – Today, we've reached a decision on how to move forward. Under the rule, women will still have access to free preventive care that includes contraceptive services -– no matter where they work. So that core principle remains. But if a woman's employer is a charity or a hospital that has a religious objection to providing contraceptive services as part of their health plan, the insurance company -– not the hospital, not the charity -– will be required to reach out and offer the woman contraceptive care free of charge, without co-pays and without hassles.
(:40) ([7] Obama on Contraception Deal) – The result will be that religious organizations won't have to pay for these services, and no religious institution will have to provide these services directly. Let me repeat: These employers will not have to pay for, or provide, contraceptive services. But women who work at these institutions will have access to free contraceptive services, just like other women, and they'll no longer have to pay hundreds of dollars a year that could go towards paying the rent or buying groceries.
• Louise Radnofsky (WSJ, 2/13/2012) Catholic Bishops Oppose Compromise on Birth-Control Insurance.
// Under the new policy, religious employers that don't want to offer contraception could exclude it from their policies. Insurance companies instead would be required to provide access to contraception for plan participants who wanted it, without explicitly charging either the religious employer or worker.
The shift is intended to ensure that women working at religious hospitals, schools and charities who want to use contraception can obtain it in the same way as women who work for secular employers. It also means the cost of providing the coverage for those women is likely to be spread across all policyholders by insurers.
The bishops had earlier expressed cautious optimism about the announcement, saying that it was "a first step in the right direction" but that they would have to study it.
In their later statement, they said they still had "serious moral concerns," noting that the proposal didn't contain provisions for religious employers who self-insure, meaning the employer takes on the underlying risk of covering employees' health care.
// President Obama telephoned the archbishop to tell him [Timothy Dolan] of the announcement Friday morning. The bishops said they hadn't been previously consulted about the proposal.
• Tony Perkins (Washington Update, 2/13/2012) See No Evil, Hear No Evil.
The President's Friday announcement was supposed to ease concerns over the contraception mandate, not harden them. But the only way to describe the White House's latest proposal is the "See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Keep Your Mouth Shut" compromise. Under the President's "accommodation," religious groups would still have to provide abortion drugs and birth control--they just wouldn't see it on the list of benefits. In this new twist, the coverage would pass through the insurance company, so the organization wouldn't hear about it--but the church's money would still be paying for it. As Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.) said, "New words, same policy."
Archbishop Charles Chaput had even harsher words for the insurance-company-as-middleman approach. "Many Catholics are confused and angry. They should be... [T]he HHS mandate, including its latest variant, is belligerent, unnecessary, and deeply offensive... [W]e cannot afford to be fooled--yet again." The administration was also out front this weekend, trying to sell its make-believe compromise on the morning shows with Chief of Staff Jack Lew. On Sunday, CBS pressed Lew on whether the President would be open to relaxing the rules further, and Lew said no. "This is our plan," he told CBS. "We're going to go ahead and implement it."
Of course, asking if there would be more compromise implies there was some to begin with. And with the exception of the President's abortion allies, most everyone sees this accommodation for the sham it is. Still, Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and abortion-apologists Catholics United are doing what they can to persuade voters otherwise. Starting today, NARAL Pro-Choice America will try to give the Obama administration cover with new ads. The campaign, which is already airing in states like Colorado, Florida, Virginia, and Wisconsin, costs a cool quarter-million. "Thanks to President Obama..." the narrator says, "women of all faiths, no matter where they work, can get contraceptive coverage."
But that's not because of anything President Obama has done. Women have always had access to contraception, including those who work at Catholic or religious organizations! Faith-based groups haven't denied access to birth control or abortion-inducing drugs. They simply haven't paid for them. "There is no crisis in 'reproductive health,'" Andrew McCarthy writes on National Review. "There is not even inconvenience. Contraception and abortion services are readily, affordably accessible to anyone who wants them... Obama dropped this bomb only because he is at war with America 's culture of individual liberty, of which religious freedom lies at the heart."
• Al Mohler (Townhall Commentary, 2/13/2012) This Is No Compromise.
President Obama walked into the White House Press Room last Friday and attempted to pull a political rabbit out of a hat. Faced with an avalanche of mounting opposition to his administration's mandate that religious employers provide birth control to all employees, the President announced what his staff characterized as a "compromise." Was it?
Well, to state the matter bluntly, no. At the end of the day, this "compromise" will resolve the issue only for those whose conscience can be resolved by an accounting maneuver.
Thus, only an accounting maneuver hides the fact that we will all be paying for chemical abortions under the President's prized Affordable Care Act.
One clear sign of what the modified policy really means"—Planned Parenthood celebrated the President's announcement.
Anyone who celebrates this "compromise" as a victory is hiding behind an accounting trick. That accounting trick cannot hide the great moral tragedy at the heart of the President's policy—a policy that leaves religious liberty in peril and Planned Parenthood smiling.
• NRO Editors (2/13/2012) The Compromise That Isn't.
// In effect, religious employers will be told that they can buy whatever policies they want, but insurers will be able to sell them only policies that cover contraception, sterilization, abortifacients, and the like. This "compromise" leaves religious employers in precisely the same position they were in before: with no way to offer insurance that does not include coverage they find morally objectionable.
It should go without saying that this coverage is not free and that insurers aren't going to be eating the expenses. The cost of providing these products and services will be exactly the same as before, irrespective of how the requirement is enforced. Non-exempt employers will be paying exactly the same premiums as under the previous policy, and their premiums will be paying for benefits that violate their religious liberties.
Catholics and others who have joined together in a groundswell of opposition to the heavy-handedness of the White House on these matters should not be duped by this act of political theater. What is at stake is a matter of first principles: If the federal government can impose this kind of pernicious requirement on religious institutions, what can it not do? Even those who are generally friendly toward contraception and abortion should be given pause by this: Any future pro-life Republican president would be invested with precisely the same powers to write his every whim into federal insurance law.
The solution to this problem is not to be found in legislative compromises or political horse-trading but in the Constitution: The American people are guaranteed the right to religious liberty by the First Amendment. That means protecting both the rights of religious institutions and those of individual citizens. There are tens of millions of pro-life Americans, representing a variety of religious affiliations. Some own businesses, and most work for non-religious employers. They have rights, too. Shouldn't they be allowed to buy and sell health-insurance plans that do not violate their consciences? At an absolute minimum, any resolution to this dispute must ensure that they do.
644-654 – • George Weigel (NRO, 2/13/2012) The Libertine Police State.
// On numerous occasions, the secretary of state has declined to speak of "religious freedom," but has referred to "freedom of worship." Thus religious freedom is rendered a kind of privacy right that can be upheld so long as what happens religiously takes place out of the public square. This is manifestly absurd on its face: For if religious freedom is simply freedom of worship, then there is religious freedom in Saudi Arabia, so long as Christian or Jewish prayer takes place behind closed doors (and no one snitches to the Islamist purity police).
• Mark Steyn (NRO, 2/11/2012) The Church of Obama.
// "We will soon learn," wrote Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, "just how much faith is left in faith-based institutions." Kathleen Sebelius, Obama's vicar on earth, has sportingly offered to maintain religious liberty for those institutions engaged in explicit religious instruction to a largely believing clientele. So we're not talking about mandatory condom dispensers next to the pulpit at St. Pat's — not yet. But that is not what it means to be a Christian: The mission of a Catholic hospital is to minister to the sick. When a guy shows up in Emergency bleeding all over the floor, the nurse does not first establish whether he is Episcopalian or Muslim; when an indigent is in line at the soup kitchen the volunteer does not pause the ladle until she has determined whether he is a card-carrying papist. The government has redefined religion as equivalent to your Sunday best: You can take it out for an hour to go to church, but you gotta mothball it in the closet the rest of the week. So Catholic institutions cannot comply with Commissar Sebelius and still be in any meaningful sense Catholic.
// None of this should come as a surprise. As Philip Klein pointed out in the American Spectator two years ago, the Obamacare bill contained 700 references to the secretary "shall," another 200 to the secretary "may," and 139 to the secretary "determines." So the secretary may and shall determine pretty much anything she wants… .
608 – Don't miss our upcoming KKLA Faith Night at Staples on Thursday March 15th to watch Blake Griffin, Chris Paul and the Clippers take on the Phoenix Suns. Tickets are only $18 through kkla.com, keyword "Clippers."
• Kathryn Jean Lopez (NRO, 2/13/2012) Obama Heals!
• Michael Barone (NRO, 2/13/2012) Picking Winners.
• NRO Editors (2/13/2012) Santorum's Turn.
• Wayne Allyn Root (NRO, 2/13/2012) Mr. Obama, we don't have a tax problem, we have a spending problem. Wayne Allyn Root is a former Libertarian vice presidential nominee. He now serves as chairman of the Libertarian National Congressional Committee. He is the best-selling author of "The Conscience of a Libertarian: Empowering the Citizen Revolution with God, Guns, Gold & Tax Cuts." Visit his web site: www.ROOTforAmerica.com.
