Each year, video game developer Eric Zimmerman hosts a contest in which designers must come up with a plausible video game concept based on an unusual theme. According to Zimmerman, the purpose of the challenge is to push for video games that set themselves apart from the usual offerings based on monsters, street fighting, or sports. Well, it's safe to say that if any of the concepts presented in ...

The 2009 economic crisis brought an interesting phrase into the headlines: toxic assets. Toxic assets are one of the factors contributing to the trouble that banks are in now. The assets are loans. Somebody owes the banks money. Normally banks want people to owe them money and pay them interest on the principal. But as the economy now stands, especially with the mortgage foreclosure crisis, many of ...

Natalie, a 22-year-old woman from San Diego, California, has decided to pay for her Masters Degree by selling something that is precious and belongs only to her: her virginity. She got the idea from her sister, who was able to save up enough money for her own degree by working as a prostitute for three weeks.

Natalie realizes that the idea may seem appalling to some, but she is unconcerned: "I know ...

Research reported in a 2008 issue of Pediatrics magazine suggests that teens who spend the most time watching sexually charged television shows are twice as likely to become pregnant or impregnate someone else. Researchers surveyed 2,003 children aged 12 to 17 in 2001, and then followed up with many of them in 2002 and 2004. When they narrowed down the teens surveyed to those who were sexually active, ...

A 2008 survey by The Barna Group asked adults which, if any, of eight behaviors with moral overtones they had engaged in during the past week. The behaviors included looking at pornography, using profanity, gambling, gossiping, engaging in sexual intercourse with someone to whom they were not married, retaliating against someone, getting drunk, and lying. Of those surveyed:

• Twenty-eight percent had used profanity.
  
  

NFL running back Shaun Alexander writes:

At the University of Alabama, I was meeting women from a lot of different backgrounds. My mother had taught me never to exploit women—that sex was meant only for marriage—and to treat women with respect. I knew the boundary lines it wasn't right to cross… I knew if I didn't keep my focus, I could fall. And it could occur anytime.

One time it ...

As a very little dust will disorder a clock, and the least sand will obscure our sight, so the least grain of sin which is upon the heart will hinder its right motion toward God.

—John Wesley, English theologian and early leader of Methodist movement (1703–1791)

In a 2007 edition of the New Oxford Review, Dr. A. Patrick Schneider II, who holds boards in family and geriatric medicine and runs a private practice in Lexington, Kentucky, did a statistical analysis of cohabitation in America, based on the findings of a number of academic resources. Here are five conclusions Schneider draws from his studies:

1. Relationships are unstable in cohabitation. One-sixth of cohabiting couples stay together for only three years; one in ten survives five or more years.
   
   

The difference between Jesus' holiness ethic and that of the Pharisees is this: the Pharisees refuse to touch any unclean thing. Jesus aims to make the unclean holy.

Refusing to clean up his own backyard has landed George Hartsuff in jail for 60 days. He can't say he wasn't warned. City officials have been asking him to do a little cleaning since 2000. Court action to ensure compliance was taken in 2002. On July 5, 2007, authorities gave Hartsuff 30 days to clean out the boats, crab pots, vending machines, and other assorted debris that littered his Maryland yard. ...