As I write, 41 people are being held hostage at gunpoint in a community center in Binghamton, NY. This just a week or so after a gunman broke into a nursing home and wantonly killed a number of residents and staff. And that shortly after a church was invaded by a gunman during morning worship, resulting in the murder of the pastor. Add to this the school shootings, missing children, rampant violence on television and in video games, the greed that has derailed the world's economy, and the reckless - that's the only word for it - spending of short-sighted politicians, and you have a situation in which the people, guided by no transcendent vision of life and truth, are casting off all restraint for the sake of getting by any means whatever they have decided they want. Proverbs 29.18 refers to what happens when Godly vision, a vision anchored in unseen, transcendent truths, is cast off in favor of an "under the sun" approach to life. Where people have no respect for or regard for God, a merely secular and material vision of life sets in, the effect of which is to relativize everything and make every person a pragmatist - whatever works is what works for me. All restraints are thrown off and life becomes a reflection of its secular vision - red in tooth and claw, subject to chance and whim, only the strong survive. How much more of this will we be willing to take before we begin to call for a re-examination of those basic life assumptions that have guided our schools, government, cultural agencies, and the marketplace for the past two generations? And who will begin to question those assumptions if not those who know them to be false. And not only false, but dangerous.

Join us Sunday at 6:00 pm Eastern for "The Gathering" as we continue our conversation about the role of vision in American life. Go to the tan box and register and get the downloads you'll need for this week.

T. M. Moore