Southern Bread

I just got back from the EPS conference last night. We had a great time and learned a lot. It was held in New Orleans, LA and hosted by the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. I had never been there so it was a neat experience to see the campus. It looks like a nice place.

All in all, I would say that the speakers were excellent. We only had one bad lecture and it was from Doug Geivett. I don’t want to desparage Dr. Geivett as an apologist in any way, but his particular talk was on the verge of horrible. It was rambling, way off-topic and, most disturbingly, exposed a severe lack of understanding of economics. His basic premise(when he finally got to it) was that when the country is made up of traditional families, that somehow makes our economic outlook better. He attributed this to “long term vision” that is natural in a traditional family(i.e., mom, dad, kids, no divorce, etc.). This is woefully simplistic and just shows a non-familiarity with basic economics.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for mom, dad, kids, no divorce, etc. I think that’s the ideal situation that all families should strive for. My beef is with saying that this is a driving factor in economic stability. He actually blamed the housing bubble/recession on a lack of family values. If that was the case then think about this. The 1920’s – 1940’s was probably the era of the most widespread traditional family values the country has ever seen. And yet we had the Great Depression. It doesn’t matter what type of families dominate the landscape. If the government comes in and rapes the economy then it’s going to cause economic problems. Bad ones.

Anyway, I was just disappointed to see such a lack of economic understanding in the upper ranks of Christian Philosophy and Apologetics circles. It would do Biola/Talbot a lot of good to hook up with The Mises Institute and bring some basic economics into their catalog.