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Carl Bereiter’s 1978 article “The Morality of Moral Education” is a serious critique of the recurring tendency in education to jump from one reform movement to another while leaving the deepest moral question unresolved: what right do educators have to shape the moral beliefs and conduct of children, and what kind of moral formation should schools actually pursue? Bereiter opens by noting that “moral education” had become the newest educational movement after earlier fashions such as programmed instruction, compensatory education, open education, and de-schooling, and he uses that setting to probe the ethical assumptions behind efforts to form character in schools. Rather than treating education as morally neutral, the article forces readers to recognize that schools inevitably transmit values through what they teach, reward, discourage, praise, and model. That makes the piece especially valuable for your argument because it supports the central point that every educational system is already engaged in moral formation—the real question is not whether children will be formed, but by what moral vision, toward what kind of person, and under what authority.....

There is no doubt that religious attachments are declining throughtout the Western world, with many young people affirming an amorphous attachment to being “spiritual” while jettisoning the rules and rituals that belong to traditional religion. Many intellectuals have gone further and promote a militant and aggressive secularism at odds with the mainstream American political tradition. In an insightful discussion of the public role of religion in American democracy, the political scientist Carson Holloway demonstrates the essential place of religion in America’s political culture. None of the Founders were political atheists: for all their differences, they agreed that “the American regime cannot attain its ends. . . in the absence of widespread religious belief and practice among its citizens.” As the great Washington noted in his 1796 “Farewell Address,” “religion and morality are indispensable supports” for political prosperity as well as the “firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.” And yet the same Washington was a forceful and eloquent defender of religious liberty as among the first of our freedoms. As Holloway ably shows, the mainstream American civic tradition saw no contradiction between promoting religious belief and practice as one of the foundations of ordered liberty, and recognizing that religious faith and practice should never be coerced. The mainstream American tradition rejects both political atheism, or militant secularism, and any coercive fusion of Church and State.....

Before standardized tests, before college admissions became the top priority, and before STEM and “career readiness” entered the conversation, education in the American colonies had one simple and urgent goal: to teach children to read so that they could read the Bible.

In 1647, the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed one of the first education laws in colonial New England—one with an unforgettable name: The Old Deluder Satan Act. The law begins with a clear conviction: “It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures…” Click here to read the full text.

The Puritans understood two things: 

1. That Satan’s strategy is to keep people ignorant of the Bible.
2. Ignorance is not a neutral thing. 

Ignorance has consequences for people and society. The Puritans knew this from the events leading to the Protestant Reformation. If people cannot read, then they cannot access Scripture for themselves. If people cannot access Scripture, then they are more easily led astray. Ignorance, then, often results in the manipulation of the ignorant, lawlessness, immorality, and poverty. ...

This is the first of seven major objections to belief in God dealt with by Lee Strobel in his book The Case for Faith. I brought plenty of copies today—pick one up afterward if you’d like to read it.

The logic goes like this:

There may be no God at all.
There may be a God who is all good.
There may be a God who is all powerful.

But there cannot be a God who is all good and all powerful, because such a God could not allow such evil and suffering as we see in this world.

Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote the New York Times best-seller, When Bad Things Happen to Good People he concluded God is all good but not all powerful. Kushner said, “It’s too difficult even for God to keep cruelty and chaos from claiming their innocent victims.”...

In “Divine Hiddenness, Greater Goods, and Accommodation,” philosopher Luke Teeninga tackles one of the most unsettling objections to belief in God: If a perfectly loving God really exists, why are there sincere people who genuinely seek Him and yet remain unconvinced that He is there? Taking seriously philosopher J. L. Schellenberg’s influential “divine hiddenness” argument, Teeninga asks whether God might have good reasons for not making His existence overwhelmingly obvious to everyone. His answer is especially intriguing: rather than searching for one single justification, Teeninga builds a cumulative “many goods” case, arguing that God’s temporary hiddenness may make possible—or make more valuable—such things as morally significant freedom, spiritual development, authentic seeking, and other important human goods. The article therefore turns the skeptic’s question around: perhaps God’s apparent hiddenness is not evidence that He does not exist at all, but part of the very kind of world in which meaningful relationship, moral choice, and genuine pursuit of God can occur....

In “No Other Name: A Middle Knowledge Perspective on the Exclusivity of Salvation Through Christ,” philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig tackles one of the most emotionally powerful objections to Christianity: If Jesus is truly the only way to salvation, what about the millions of people who have lived and died without ever hearing His name? Rather than avoiding the difficulty, Craig confronts it head-on, asking whether God can be both perfectly loving and perfectly just while salvation remains exclusively through Christ. Drawing on the concept of divine middle knowledge—God’s knowledge of how every person would freely respond in every possible circumstance—Craig argues that it is logically possible for God to providentially arrange the world so that no one is ultimately lost merely because of where or when they were born. The article is especially compelling because it does not weaken Jesus’ exclusive claim; instead, it attempts to show how “no one comes to the Father except through Me” can remain fully true while God’s fairness, mercy, and universal love are also preserved....