The new book by David Green has the arresting title, Giving It All Away. He is the founder of Hobby Lobby and tells the story of his success and calls for Christians to give generously to churches and other ministries. He was on my radio program last week, and we talked about Hobby Lobby, the Museum of the Bible, and their court case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Green family has been at the center of all of this and much more.

Most people know that Hobby Lobby is closed on Sunday. They may not also realize that their stores close earlier (8 PM) than other stores. That means that they are only open 66 hours a week and compete with stores open many more hours. David Green did this so that his employees can spend more time with their families.

Hobby Lobby also pays its full-time employees well. Back in 2009, they raised the base pay to $10/hour. The next year they tacked on another dollar. They next year they did it again and then again. This is another way that the Green family values their employees.

I asked David Green if he ever imagined that he would have to sue the federal government. The thought never crossed his mind, but they did so when the HHS mandate would have required them to provide abortifacients for their employees. The fines alone would have cost him $1.3 million per day.

Much of his book focuses on giving and challenges Christians to engage in the adventure of tithing. He has three principles they use and encourages all of us to implement them as well. First, set your criteria. What are you going to fund? What are your priorities? Second, set your giving amount. Give the first fruits, not what is left over. And finally, set fire for the future. He also has written about how to make generosity generational.

His book is certain to spark your interest and encourage you in giving.

New York has decided to embark on an economic experiment. It has become the first state to offer free college tuition for its residents. Not everyone is excited about this idea. Brandon Muir, executive director of Reclaim New York, said, “Governor Cuomo’s taxpayer-backed college tuition plan is so reckless, no other state has been dumb enough to try it.” San Francisco has offered free community college tuition to its residents. Rhode Island is considering a similar measure, and a few other states are experimenting with some sort of tuition subsidy.

Offering free college tuition doesn’t mean that professors have now decided to teach for free. It doesn’t mean that academic buildings no longer cost the university. What it does mean is that New York taxpayers get to pick up the tab. Republicans in the New York state senate were able to add one requirement to the bill. They lobbied to force students to live and work in the state of New York for as many years as they received aid.

The proposal is only available to families that make less than $100,000 per year. Nevertheless, the New York plan strikes many people as unfair. New York taxpayers who never went to college or did not achieve a bachelor’s degree must foot the bill for students in a four-year college in New York. And those who did receive a college degree worked jobs and took out loans in order to graduate, now have to pay for students who get their tuition for free. All of these taxpayers face the prospect of earning less in the future than these students now enrolled in college.

Another concern is how free college tuition will affect future tuition increases. If a university is no longer accountable to parents and students who used to pay for tuition, tuition will likely increase even faster than it has in the past.

A number of political candidates have talked about providing free college tuition. Now we will see how it works. I’m skeptical.

The Supreme Court has ruled that public schools can teach about religion but they cannot indoctrinate students into a religion. So many schools simply avoid the possible controversy altogether by not teaching about religion at all.

That is why the latest controversy is hard to imagine. The Christian Action Network says that the U.S. Department of Education is funding an Islamic education program in the public schools that crosses the line from academics to indoctrination.

I had Martin Mawyer, president of the organization, on my radio program to talk about the program known as “Access Islam.” The curriculum includes 10 lesson plans on the “Five Pillars of Islam” and “Prayer in Muslim Life” and “Ramadan Observance.” It is worth mentioning that a search for similar lesson plans) covering Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, or Hinduism found nothing.

Teachers are to quiz students on such questions as, “What does a Muslim prayer sound like?” and “What are some of the things that Muslims say while they are praying?” Students are expected to construct a poster on the “Five Pillars of Islam.” These are then posted in the classroom and in the halls. You can only imagine the reaction of the ACLU and other civil libertarians if students were asked to make a poster of the Ten Commandments and then put those posters up in their room or in the school hallways.

The Christian Action Network send a demand letter to Education Secretary Betsy DeVoss as well as to other officials. It articulates the discrepancies between how Islam is treated in the lesson plans and how others religious faiths are ignored. They demand that all these materials be removed from the classroom and that public funds are no longer used to promote the Muslim faith.

The materials certainly seem to have crossed constitutional lines, but it is possible that nobody wants to speak up for fear of being labelled as Islamophobic. Thankfully some do see that this is a clear example of indoctrination.

The Supreme Court has ruled that public schools can teach about religion but they cannot indoctrinate students into a religion. So many schools simply avoid the possible controversy altogether by not teaching about religion at all.

That is why the latest controversy is hard to imagine. The Christian Action Network says that the U.S. Department of Education is funding an Islamic education program in the public schools that crosses the line from academics to indoctrination.

I had Martin Mawyer, president of the organization, on my radio program to talk about the program known as “Access Islam.” The curriculum includes 10 lesson plans on the “Five Pillars of Islam” and “Prayer in Muslim Life” and “Ramadan Observance.” It is worth mentioning that a search for similar lesson plans) covering Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, or Hinduism found nothing.

Teachers are to quiz students on such questions as, “What does a Muslim prayer sound like?” and “What are some of the things that Muslims say while they are praying?” Students are expected to construct a poster on the “Five Pillars of Islam.” These are then posted in the classroom and in the halls. You can only imagine the reaction of the ACLU and other civil libertarians if students were asked to make a poster of the Ten Commandments and then put those posters up in their room or in the school hallways.

The Christian Action Network send a demand letter to Education Secretary Betsy DeVoss as well as to other officials. It articulates the discrepancies between how Islam is treated in the lesson plans and how others religious faiths are ignored. They demand that all these materials be removed from the classroom and that public funds are no longer used to promote the Muslim faith.

The materials certainly seem to have crossed constitutional lines, but it is possible that nobody wants to speak up for fear of being labelled as Islamophobic. Thankfully some do see that this is a clear example of indoctrination.

When is identification necessary in our society? At least one U.S. district judge believes it is unnecessary when we vote. Earlier this month she struck down the Texas requirement that voters have a photo ID in order to vote. Any one of seven forms of identification could be used at the polling place. And if people did not have a driver’s license or other appropriate ID, they could sign an affidavit declaring that they have an impediment to obtaining required identification.

An article in the Washington Examiner listed “24 things that require a photo ID” and included funny pictures with each to drive the point home. The author suggested we would be better served in getting IDs to people who are supposedly disenfranchised instead of trying to end voter laws that require an ID.

You cannot buy alcohol without an ID. If you are under 27 years of age and want to buy cigarettes, you will be asked for an ID in most states. You need an ID to open a bank account. You need an ID to apply for food stamps and to apply for other welfare benefits. You need an ID to apply for Medicaid and Social Security.

You need an ID to apply for a job and to apply for unemployment. You need an ID to rent or buy a house and to apply for a mortgage. You need an ID to rent a car or to buy a car. Of course, you also need a driver’s license to drive a car. You need an ID to get on an airplane. You need an ID to get married. You need an ID to buy a gun. You need an ID to apply for a hunting license or a fishing license. You need an ID to rent a hotel room. You need an ID to buy a cell phone. You need an ID to pick up a prescription and even to buy certain cold medications. You need an ID to give a blood donation.

We need an ID to do more than these two-dozen things. Unfortunately, we have a district judge who has ruled that you don’t need a photo ID to vote.

The Bible describes many miracles, but we also have other literature and even modern claims of miracles. Is there any way to evaluate these claims in a rational way?

Dr. Timothy McGrew (Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Western Michigan University) was recently on my radio program. He has developed a six-part test that uses the acrostic DOUBTS. The resurrection of Jesus Christ passes the filter while many other miracle claims quickly fail.

D is for distant events. For example, the miracles Apollonius supposedly did in India are first reported far away in the Roman Empire. O is for opinions that are already established. We should suspect stories of miracles that seem to affirm standing opinions to those in power. Dr. McGrew points to the healing miracles attributed to Vespasius as an illustration. U is for uncertain events. A rainstorm that happens that helped an army is probably not a miracle but a natural occurrence and fortunate coincidence.

B is for belated reports. Some of the reports of miracles were written long after the events. Consider the so-called miracles performed by Pythagoras. He lived around 500 BC. The first reports we have of these supposed miracles occur in AD 300.

T is for trivial things. Thomas Henry Huxley once said that if twelve good Englishmen told him they saw a centaur trotting down Pickadilly Lane, he would not believe it. But this event makes no claims on my life and it doesn’t change my doctrine or worldview. The resurrection is a much different claim. S is for self-serving miracle reports. Some of the claims that Joseph Smith made could be put in this category. There could be another motives for his claims.

This test is a good one to use when we come across claims of miracles.

Whenever there is a mass shooting we read headlines or hear commentators describe it as a random shooting. While it is true that many times the victims are chosen at random, the locations for their carnage are rarely random.

When Dr. John Lott was on my radio program I asked him about this. I had heard that the shooter at the Aurora, Colorado movie theater bypassed many other theaters and venues because those locations had security.

John Lott said the diary of the killer (James Holmes) explained his selection. He decided not to attack the Denver airport because he wrote that it had “substantial security.” Then out of seven theaters within 20 minutes of the shooter’s apartments, Holmes went to the only theater that banned concealed handguns.

John Lott gave another example from the church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina. The shooter (Dylann Roof) originally planned to go to the College of Charleston. But he changed his plans after realizing the school had armed guards. While drinking at someone’s house, Roof blurted out his plan to carry out a mass shooting at the College of Charleston. The person who heard the comment said: “I don’t think the church was his primary target because he told us he was going for the school.” The person at the party concluded that because Roof couldn’t get into the school, he settled for the church.

If gun-free zones seem to make people more vulnerable to shooters, is there anything that might reduce the likelihood of a mass shooting? John Lott and Bill Landes in a scholarly research paper gathered more than twenty years of data on mass public shootings. They studied the impact of gun-control laws. None of these laws had an impact on shootings except one. They concluded that “the only law that had a statistically significant impact on mass public shootings was the passage of right-to-carry laws.”

Our elected officials need so consider these facts if they really want to keep people in their communities safe.

Professor Mike Van Biezen begins his article on global warming with these three words: “It made sense.” He is talking about the original charts most of us saw years ago. The amount of CO2 was increasing and so was global temperature.

When I was in graduate school, I looked at those graphs and made the natural assumption that CO2 was causing the earth’s temperature to rise. The correlation seemed too obvious to ignore. Only years later did it occur to me that it might have been the other way around. In other words, as the Earth’s temperature increases, CO2 increases because the ocean waters release more CO2.

Professor Van Biezen began to rethink his assumptions when he noted that from 1940 to 1980, temperatures actually declined a bit while CO2 concentrations were dramatically increasing. It is true that the global average temperature has increased slightly since the 1980s, but not to the degree one would expect if CO2 from human activity were the primary cause.

He and other scientists have pulled together many scientific facts that question that assumption that CO2 and human activity are causing global warming. Temperature records from around the world and from satellite data do not support the assumption that temperatures are rising rapidly.

They also point to many periods prior to our recent history when we had warmer climates that could not have been caused by human activity since they preceded the industrial revolution. The Medieval warming period and the climate during Roman times are just a few examples. Parts of the Netherlands disappeared under water during such warming periods only to appear later when the climate turned colder. A city in Belgium that used to be a seaport is now ten miles away from the coastline.

All of this points to the fact that climate has indeed been changing, and human activity may not be as responsible as some environmentalists would have you believe.