The Voice of Reason

It's always irked me when someone raises the stakes in an argument and says "you've offended me!" I understand that some things are just plain offensive–filthy sexual jokes, shirts with senseless hateful messages on them, tasteless halloween costumes –but it seems to me that the widely held belief is that these things are wrong because they are offensive . This, I believe, is dangerously false. The above list of things are not wrong because they are offensive; they are offensive because they are wrong . This is an important distinction. Stating it this way makes it clear that "offending" someone in and of itself is amoral. It alone is neither right nor wrong; it is just the result of their reaction to your words or actions. That being said, context and care for how someone will receive something is always in good order and is an ever-essential part of Christian charity. But I want to talk about those things which we say to or do in front of our peers...

The concept of training  is familiar to every athlete. There are countless ways in which to train; a plethora of strategies and schools of thought on how to go about it. However, they all have at least one common element: in order to improve, the trainee must commit to making himself uncomfortable in every session, day after day after day. In fact, my dad once said he thought of that point where you get uncomfortable as the starting point of the workout, and the pushing you do after that is the deciding element for the gains you make. Every workout, the athlete willingly takes on a load (be it weight, time, distance, etc.) that is progressively more difficult. The goal is that bearing a certain load become much easier and the athlete become more proficient at bearing it. Another common element of training is one that is pretty obvious but still important: timing. You have to train–choose to take on the load–with a fair amount of foresight; you have to start training long before the...