When George Washington took his Oath of Office as the nation’s first president in 1789, he established a ceremony that continues to this day–and will be repeated once again when President George W. Bush is inaugurated tomorrow.

Signals of distress continue to come from multiple sectors of the culture. Issues ranging from sexuality and politics to art and education register seismic shifts of cultural consequence. Turning its back on a rich moral inheritance and severing its few remaining ties with Christian morality, this culture seems absolutely determined to bring itself to the very brink of moral collapse.

We are living in dangerous times, but far too many Americans seem to have forgotten this unforgiving fact. How can so many forget the unforgettable?

As “partial-birth abortion” emerged into America’s consciousness, an Oregon woman named Jenny Westberg made a series of simple pen-and-ink drawings of the procedure. Those pictures–striking in their simplicity and devastating in their clarity–would change the trajectory of America’s abortion debate. Evil flourishes in the darkness, and Westberg’s drawings brought the murderous abortion procedure to light.

The 2004 presidential campaign has been described as one of the most polarizing contests in the nation’s history. With the electoral map divided between “red” and “blue” states reflecting partisan, cultural, and ideological divisions, Americans are coming to terms with the fact that this nation is deeply divided over serious issues of meaning, morality, and basic vision.

We are living in an age of unprecedented media access and almost every American home has access to multiple media options. Cable news channels provide a constant stream of reports even as the Internet erases the final geographic barriers to information transfer. Newspapers, talk radio, and the older network news broadcasts must be added to the mix, providing citizens with an overload of information and images.

How should Christians engage the news media? The expanding controversy over CBS News reports on President George W. Bush’s National Guard service–and the network’s acknowledgement that it used faked documents in its report–raises a host of issues about truth-telling, media credibility, and evangelical responsibility. Let me suggest ten principles for responsible evangelical engagement with the news media. Our responsibility is to consider the news–and the making of news–from a Christian worldview perspective. That makes a huge difference in how we analyze, assimilate, and judge media reports.

Memorial Day 2004 comes with American troops deployed around the globe, standing in harm’s way for the sake of freedom around the world. These soldiers stand in a proud and glorious line, starting with the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord, and continuing down to those who so proudly wear the American uniform today.

“Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes.” With those words, French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel sounded an alarm as the ramparts of democratic conviction were under attack by the political left. Revel, one of the most important conservative thinkers in France, saw European intellectuals and the political left in America undermining the very foundations of democracy.

The American people seem to be somewhat uncertain about our military action in the War on Terror and concerned about how the administration should respond to the hard work of rebuilding a stable post-war society in Iraq. Perhaps this is a good time to look backwards and remember a time when America was more certain about our military aims and the high cost of keeping the peace.