Moral Apologetics Press has for its primary purpose the publication of books that advance the mission of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. This mission has six crucial ingredients: (1) defending theistic ethics against various objections and offering positive evidential reasons in its favor; (2) critiquing secular ethical theories and demonstrating their relative inadequacy in accounting for the full range of moral phenomena in need of explanation; (3) defending moral realism on which the enterprise of moral apologetics is predicated; (4) extending the moral argument to a positive moral case for Christianity in particular; (5) highlighting the rich and fertile history of the moral argument; and (6) encouraging dialogue with non-Christian religious approaches by comparing and contrasting their ethical foundations with those from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Telling Tales: Intimations of the Sacred in Popular Culture
By Marybeth and David Baggett
Telling Tales distills twenty years’ worth of reflections on popular culture through the lens of faith and reason, literature and philosophy. Recurring and integrating motifs of the volume center on the character of God and the nature and value of people, winsomely explored with a light touch. Canvassing pop culture artifacts as diverse as Harry Potter and Firefly, these reflections challenge readers to look closer and attend to inchoate echoes of the sacred in the otherwise familiar and mundane.
“Telling Tales is a rich collection that brings together many years of thoughtful cultural analysis. Marybeth and David Baggett offer much timeless wisdom about our changing world in these pages.”
– Philip Tallon, author of The Absolute Basics of the Christian Faith
Humble Beginnings in a Whirlwind 2020: A History of HBU’s Center for Moral Apologetics (Vol. 1).
By David Baggett
The Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University got underway in 2020, a year for the ages—a most trying and tumultuous time whose vagaries and vicissitudes could hardly have been predicted in advance, and which seem almost surreal in retrospect. The inaugural director of the Center kept, almost accidentally, a journal through much of the year, intermittent at first, and later in earnest. Jacqueline Woodson once wrote, “The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate.” These pages chronicle personal, local, and national events of this remarkable time—the context culminating in the Center at long last transforming from marinating dream to concrete reality. During the pilgrimage the author has occasion to talk about his vision for the Center, steps toward its inception, and his family’s transition from Virginia to Texas in the throes of a pandemic. They capture the opening pages of a fresh, exciting chapter: the first fledging steps and humble beginnings of an ambitious new initiative fraught with pitfalls and rife with potential.
The Ichabod Letters: Epistles from a Junior Demon
By Elton D. Higgs
Administering a website like this occasionally makes editors privy to some exotic and intriguing correspondence. In light of the particularly dark nature of some letters we have stumbled upon—we can’t reveal exactly how—we thought it our duty to share this series of missives. We appear to be in possession of only one side of the exchange of letters—from a nephew to his uncle. The nephew’s name is Ichabod and his uncle is Apollyon, who seems to be in an advisory position of some sort. It’s not our intent to demonize anyone by divulging what we have seen, but we feel we are performing an important service by bringing this devilishly cunning correspondence to light.- The Editors of MoralApologetics
The Wrackturn Method: A Student Tempter’s Guide to The Subversion of Christian Higher Education
By Brian Melton
In The Wrackturn Method, historian Brian Melton, inspired by C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, shines a satirical and unflinching light on an array of subtle and alluring temptations—not out of cynicism or despair, but out of deep faith, hope, and love. In the process he casts an inspiring vision for how Christians can educate excellently. Having dedicated his professional life to this end, Melton’s imaginative work here is required reading for those who feel a passion for higher Christian education.
Buddhism or Christianity: Which is Better for the World
By Daniel McCoy
This book contrasts Buddhism with Christianity in five crucial areas, namely, their viewpoints on ultimate reality, ultimate attachments, ultimate aversions, ultimate example, and ultimate purpose. These five areas provide the content to accurately define Buddhist compassion and Christian love. Buddhist compassion is the overarching term that will be used to denote the Buddhist response to this-worldly suffering, while Christian love is the overarching term used for the Christian response.
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