We explore real-life reformation here in this informed, online community.
A "Fourth Turning" is a deadly event an entire nation goes through…around every 80 years....according to Strauss and Howe, who published a 1990s book by that title. Because America has experienced several of these "fourth turnings," the authors predicted MATHEMATICALLY, a quarter century ago, that America would enter another severe, killer catastrophe right about now...falling deeply into a crisis of crime, amorality, darkness, uncertainty and estrangement from a previous moral high ground.
If we look back 80 years, and keep looking back another 80 years, sure enough, America went through five life-and-death crises in 1623, 1703, 1783, 1863, and 1943. And 80 years later here we are again in 2023... without dependable standards for law, justice, order; without definitions for family and gender; without economic stability; without honest coinage, without international friendships, without an orderly military; without Biblical literacy; and every man is doing what is right in his own eyes. And almost every man is getting it wrong and is hurtling headlong along a downward trajectory.
But didn't America make the turn out of all those other crises? Yes. But those turnings were led by humble and repentant leaders who had developed a reverence for God's ways and God's laws. Unless such men appear on the scene today, and are followed in a new and redemptive direction, America will not make the turn. History is not so cyclical that God is obliged to keep to some mathematical calendar, or numerical pattern. He keeps to his covenant promises. If a nation turns, he helps. If a nation does not, the cycle is broken. Not by God, but by the stiff-necked, lawless citizens who refuse to turn around, and the nation descends further and faster into its own willful extinction.
Most people hear “Hormuz” and think gas prices.
That’s part of it. But it’s bigger. It’s a central artery for global trade, and we talked about how disruptions hit second-order systems fast, including inputs tied to food production (field work and fertilizers), trucking, and downstream shocks in everything from shipping insurance to medicine, medical supplies, medical treatments and regional stability.
This is why the “we’re energy independent so it doesn’t matter” line is naive. In a globally priced commodity world, you don’t get to opt out.
Former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali comes to Christ and discovers the supernatural Christian heritage of West, and how worldly families destroyed it. She is now married and living in the US.
"I like Os Guinness’s analogy of the cut flower civilization. I find it very vivid in regard to non-Christian conservative parents. Conservative non-Christian families are cutting themselves off from our foundational roots.
Let’s think about what happens to a plant when the roots die. What happens when you pick flowers and put them in a vase? Obviously, the flowers wither. And if you cut conservative morals off from Christianity, they fade.
"This decline is exactly what we have seen in the West over the last century and a half. Some people say the decay dates back to the Enlightenment. It’s a gradual fading that goes on and on. My fear is that we have landed in a place of moral wilderness.
"For the West to restore itself, it has to rediscover and revive its biblical roots. I insist that the biblical...
A number of officials with high-level security clearance, and copious amounts of intel, have warned the president about this. This includes Mr. Vance and Tulsi Gabbard. But for some inexplicable reason, Mr. Trump was unentreatable. A seductive influence has moved him away from his previous, sincerely held opinions. Below are a few he expressed in public, going back a quarter century.
“I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars.”
“We’re going to end these endless wars.”
“We will turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars. They never ended.”
“I will expel the warmongers from our national security state… and stop the war profiteering.”
“He [his predecessors] sent our blood and treasure to back regime change in Iraq, regime change in Libya, regime change in Syria and every other globalist disaster for half a century.
“We believe that the job of the United States military is not to wage endless regime-change wars around the globe, ...
