Josh Benner

Category: Commentary

  • The death that started a world war: 100 years later

    archduke

    It’s interesting to look at photos from the beginning of World War I. They look like they could be from the Napoleonic Era. Yet by the end of the war, armies were fighting with airplanes and tanks. The world changed. World War I set the stage for World War II. With the tensions of the war and an impoverished Russia helped lead to the collapse of the Romanov Dynasty. The result was communism in the newly formed Soviet Union. The Ottoman Empire, which had lasted since the Middle Ages, collapsed. To the victor goes the spoils, and as oil was starting to become more important, imperial European nations took advantage of the Middle East. But a casualty of the fall of the Ottoman Empire was the relative stability of the region. As a result of the war, the League of Nations was created as a precursor to today’s United Nations.

    In the generation before the war, most of the fighting in which European armies had engaged was in imperial skirmishes against opponents with inferior equipment. The conventional methods used in World War I had not caught up with technology. A war that started in the summer, and which most of Europe thought would be finished by Christmas trudged on for four years. Causalities were on a scale never before seen in human history. (more…)

  • Eric Cantor’s humiliating defeat

    cantor

    Eric Cantor lost today. Pretty remarkable given his name recognition, given the fact that he is the house majority leader, given the fact that the congressional system is already setup to benefit incumbents, given the fact that he had the GOP machine backing him, given the fact that he outspent his challenger 5:1. Yet, he lost. And that’s wonderful. Because like so many of the other republicans in congress, Cantor is a disaster. John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and on and on. All of them are a bunch of big government, big spending RINO’s. All of them have been weak at standing up to Obama in terms of spending, in terms of him exceeding his power and working around congress to push his agenda. They all play political games while the country is driven further into the ground by an ever expanding and bloated federal government. (more…)

  • Why Christians should care more about Pentecost Sunday

    Photo courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons
    Photo courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons

    We all know that Christmas is when we celebrate the birth of Christ. And we know that Easter is the recognition of the persecution, execution, and resurrection of Jesus. But Pentecost Sunday is an annual event which is also of major significance. It is sometimes referred to as the Church’s “birthday.”

    “Pentecost” comes from the Greek word for 50. Pentecost Sunday occurs 7 weeks after Easter every year (this year, on June 8). The first Pentecost Sunday is recorded in Acts 2. (more…)

  • The Fault in our Stars: movie faithful to the book

    Fault_in_our_stars

    When I first heard that the book “The Fault in our Stars” was about a girl with cancer, I thought that it was going to be a piece of schmaltzy garbage. When I picked up the book in February, I was immediately drawn in, reading it in two long sittings over the span of about 11 hours. Since that day, I had been eagerly awaiting the movie that was released last night.

    I won’t say anything that would potentially spoil the movie until the last paragraph. The theater was one of the fullest I’ve been to in a long time. I felt that this movie was as true to the book as any film adaptation I have ever seen. Shailene Woodley, who plays the book’s protagonist, Hazel Grace Lancaster, had the feel and spunk that you would expect from Hazel. Ansel Elgort plays Augustus Waters and even looks like how I pictured Gus, and was another perfect embodiment of the fictional character. In the book, a love story develops between Hazel and Augustus as they meet at a support group for teens with cancer. Woodley and Elgort had great chemistry on-screen, and the development of their relationship felt natural. (more…)

  • The ghost of Reagan: words resonate 10 years after his death

    reagan

    Ronald Reagan died 10 years ago today. While I’m too young to remember his presidency, over the years, I’ve learned a lot about Reagan, and I believe that he is the greatest president in modern American history. Did he make mistakes? Of course.

    But I look to Reagan and I so many great qualities that our current president lacks. Reagan built up the military, Obama tears it down. Reagan was a leader. Obama is an appeaser. Reagan believed that it was “morning in America.” Obama wants to “fundamentally transform America.” I find myself asking how President Obama would have handled diplomatic situations with the Soviet Union. For Reagan, he knew that America had the moral high ground between the tyrannical regimes that communism led to. He wasn’t a cultural relativist, he viewed it as the great evil that it was. As Reagan said in his great “A Time for Choosing” speech, ” We’re at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it’s been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it’s time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.” (more…)