The Good Mans Dilemma

-It's not personal; it's just business, - says the professional killer to his victim. But business is always personal, and even though modern business corporations have been granted the legal status of persons, they are still part of the impersonal engines of society that operate far beyond human reach. Keith Hart explores in his thought-provoking pamphlet The Hitman's Dilemma how we have never been more conscious of ourselves as unique personalities, but we live in a society increasingly ruled by faceless corporate forces. He ultimately asks: What place is there for the humanity of individual persons in the dehumanized social and economic frameworks we live within? This is the hitman's dilemma, and it is ours as well.

One look at our cultural moment and it's easy to tell that men and their identities are in crisis. Though lost and fractured, men face the pressure to be perfect. Our reactionary society is quick to condemn and slow to forgive, leaving men more confused than ever about how to live and who to be. Yet in Scripture, we continually find God choosing to work in and through flawed, imperfect, and broken individuals. Men who had massive character flaws and significant moral failings, but who also shared one important characteristic: the desire to follow the call of their Creator. With engaging personal stories and insight into biblical truths, Nathan Clarkson declares to today's man that he is more than what the culture is telling him he is--angry, selfish, predatory, violent, and bored. Instead, still on the journey himself, Nathan calls today's man to find his identity in the One who created him on purpose, for a purpose, and encourages him to live an honest, authentic life marked by a winsome combination of confidence and humility.

Many people today would list many different things as being man’s dilemma—such things as health problems, unemployment, poverty, crime, war, and so on. Each, of course, is a problem found in every society, excluding none. One could say man’s dilemma is universal and they would be correct. However, each of the things listed above are actually the result of man’s dilemma, not the cause. The cause is found in man’s depravity. In that depravity, every un-regenerated human being sets his own standard as to his or her conduct of life. Man has rejected the absolute standard of his creator and as a result is alienated toward not only God, but from one another. Man has no solution for this and therein lays the dilemma. God, on the other hand, has the solution; it is found in His provision, the Lord Jesus Christ. In the pages of this work the author considers man’s dilemma God’s solution from eleven different perspectives. Each chapter is a study in itself, but fits nicely as one completed work.

In this moving and eloquent portrait, John Heilbron describes how the founder of quantum theory rose to the pinnacle of German science. With great understanding, he shows how Max Planck suffered morally and intellectually as his lifelong habit of service to his country and to physics was confronted by the realities of World War I and the brutalities of the Third Reich. In an afterword written for this edition, Heilbron weighs the recurring questions among historians and scientists about the costs to others, and to Planck himself, of the painful choices he faced in attempting to build an “ark” to carry science and scientists through the storms of Nazism.