In the recent cinematic production of Marvel Studios Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017), a ruthless “Celestial” (deity), who came into existence millions of years ago and goes by the name “Ego,” has grown bored of his own immortality, not to mention being deeply disappointed with the inferior beings who inhabit the universe. So…

From the dark abyss of suffering was born my book Biblical Ethics. Five years ago, the last thing on my mind was writing a book on how to live a morally happy, flourishing life. I was deep in the throes of a PhD program when the walls of my intellectual ivory tower came crashing down….

When we live the way we are supposed to, God is glorified and we are blessed (happy)! Sadly, most well-meaning dutiful Christians take issue with the notion that happiness is for the here-and-now, delaying it for the afterlife. Too often they gorge themselves on an ethical diet of doing the right thing out of a…

When I was in graduate school at Biola, I had a professor who would call us “naturalists”! At the time I thought he was saying it in jest, but now I realize he was at least partially kidding. So how can self-professed Christians be naturalists? I think what my professor meant was that as Christians…

Worldly “happiness” is merely subjective (i.e., emotional) and non-virtuous, ergo, non-moral, not to mention superficial and fleeting. The world seeks it directly as a feeling but cannot attain it because true happiness is a byproduct of morality (e.g., justice and righteousness). By comparison, biblical happiness is character-based. That is, true felicity is virtuous, ergo, moral….

One of my favorite Bible verses is 2 Corinthians 5:17, which claims, “anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!” (NLT) But what does that mean in relation to who we are as a complete human being? Does it mean that everything about…

Curiosity and distractibility are braided together. Imagination and impulsivity hold hands. Temptation is built in to this intricate web of choosing. Patience–a virtue–is your best friend helping you unravel the knots of tension between beauty and betrayal. Wisdom–another friendly virtue–requires a vocation of untangling flowers from weeds. This, too, is the plight of an artist.

Epistemology is a beam of light that emits natural revelation and illuminates our path to continue seeking not only the origin to thought provoking questions but also to arouse genuine curiosity towards its eternal Source.

The struggles we encounter are not always elicited by self-destruction and self-dilapidation, but by strategic trials that are necessarily entailed by divine circumstances. Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. This is not an appointed suffering by a draconian deity. Look at the life of a “blameless and upright”…

For thousands of years, since the time of Plato, the gauntlet against divine command theory (DCT) has been thrown down. Relatively recently, Robert Adams has retrieved it engaging the conversation with his modified DCT, in which he invokes the loving nature of God and his revealed will. Linda Zagzebski, however, sees a fly in the…