Father's Day this year is more than a holiday designed to make it Christmas year-round for greeting card companies. It's even more than a holiday designed to boost sales of neckties and aftershave lotion. The holiday should remind all of us that when a father walks out on his children through divorce, he is not only heaping up for his children a pile of negatives that will last for a long time, but removing the positives.

It's a little over a year since Christians committed to standing up against feminist pressures in biblical translation won a stunning victory. Zondervan and the International Bible Society, facing pressure particularly from Southern Baptists and Focus on the Family, agreed on Memorial Day, 1997, to drop plans to publish a gender-neutral translation.

Love and marriage, love and marriage, they go together like a horse and carriage. Ask the local gentry, they'll all say it's elementary."

Often elementary, perhaps, when Frank Sinatra sang those words in decades past; certainly not child's play now. Elementary, when husband and wife see themselves as "one flesh"; complicated when we see ourselves as autonomous individuals. Elementary, when husbands love wives and wives submit to husbands (Ephesians 5); complicated when men are not kind and women respond in kind.

I still remember the time a decade ago I visited a man who had taught me much about Christianity a decade before that. He had moved away from Christ and it showed, even in the way he and his family ate dinner, from pizza boxes scattered on the floor in front of the television. There wasn't even a "Good food, good meat, thank God, let's eat" type of pseudo-prayer. His children had fallen into the natural tendency to vulturize the victuals.

The message from the Clinton scandal seems clear: No summer vacation this year. Inch by inch the Starr offensive advances, as the president fails in his attempt to save himself by distorting the doctrine of executive privilege. Inch by inch Ken Starr and his lieutenant, Hickman Ewing, ignore Clinton administration anti-Christian name-calling ("religious fanatic") and continue to compile evidence.

Exactly 250 years ago, Samuel Davies wrote in his Bible one short sentence-"Settled in Hanover Virginia May 1748"-and the history of America changed.

Mr. Davies was a young Presbyterian minister called to Virginia to put flesh on the future the great evangelist George Whitefield had glimpsed during his foray into the South a decade earlier: that "God intended, in His own time, to work a good work in these southern parts of America. At present they seem more dead to God but far less prejudiced than in the northern parts."

Some evangelists, if allowed to orate at one of the college commencement ceremonies coming up this month, would thunder against outright atheism. I wonder, though, if the problem many students face is not more devilishly subtle. Students I teach at the University of Texas frequently tell me that they come from "Christian homes," and some consider themselves Christians. The problem, though, is that Satan is slick: He has insinuated in many the desire to slice and dice the Bible as they see fit.