“The most unappreciated fact about the three most galvanizing performers in early rock ‘n’ roll—Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard Penniman—is that they all grew up in the Pentecostal church. Presley and Lewis were raised in the predominately white Assemblies of God, and Penniman in a variety of black Holiness and Church of God …
Communion Betrayed
In this fallen world, we have to anticipate what happens whenever a covenant is broken. When men and women marry, they exchange vows in public, promising to forsake all others. Why is this necessary? The answer is that we are a race of sinners, and we cannot assume that people will do what they say …
Maybe It’s Too Obvious
“It is remarkable that in this age of rampant victimology, the persecution of Christians by Muslims has become a taboo subject in the Western academy. A complex web of myths, outright lies, and deliberately imposed silence dominates it. Thirteen centuries of religious discrimination, causing suffering and death of countless millions, have been covered by the …
Hoochie Koo
“Young whites hired R&B bands for high school dances and frat parties. Then the craze spread to the North, where it was picked up by an enterprising DJ in Cleveland named Alan Freed, who decided to make a splash with an R&B radio show aimed specifically at white youth. To mask the racial origins of …
In a Chain of Invincible Reasoning
“If contentious men can find nothing against their brethren, they will surmise there is something. If they can find nothing in their actions to judge, they will judge their hearts. If there is nothing above board, they will think there may be something under board; and from thinking there may be something they will think …
America Sins at Dan and Bethel
Gelernter’s second chapter is quite valuable — in it he shows how American history is marinated in the Bible, and particularly in the cadences of the King James Bible. Back in the first chapter, he had noted what he means by the phrase “biblical republic.” “That’s what I mean by ‘biblical republic’: not a theocracy; …
America as Religion
The first chapter of Americanism is entitled “I Believe in America,” and it reveals the basic problem. A number of people have wanted to say that America is “dedicated to a proposition,” and that we are not bound together by those ties that bind other nations — things like language, culture, music, food, and common …
Fall Conference
It was recently brought to my attention that I missed a question in the comments section of one of my shameless appeals. David Bayly asked this about our ministerial conference in October: “Further information on this would be helpful for those of us who have to plan significantly ahead to attend such conferences. For instance, …
Anselm and Creedal Advance
As surprising as it may seem to some, the church grows and matures in her understanding over time. In other words, some battles are actually won, and certain doctrines are really established, and they stay established. Some of this can be seen in the pages of the New Testament, and other examples are found at …
Their Consistency is Our Hypocrisy
“What the Crusaders did to the Muslim inhabitants of Jerusalem in 1099 was as bad as what the Muslims had done to countless Christian cities before and after that time, but the carnage was less pardonable because, unlike the Muslims’, it was not justifiable by Christian religious tenets. From the distance of almost a millennium, …