Around the time of our city election a week or so ago, you may recall that the news broke that a list of Christ Church businesses was being circulated for purposes of boycotting them. There has been some fallout from all that which you might be interested in. This is not everything that happened, but …
Christian Living in Third Gear
Feeling Good About Behaving Badly
“This is the lie that is at the heart of our society, the lie that encourages every form of destructive self-indulgence to flourish: for while we ascribe our conduct to pressures from without, we obey the whims that well up from within, thereby awarding ourselves carte blanche to behave as we choose. Thus we feel …
The Hand of the Lord On Presbyterians
“Isaiah 9:21: ‘Manasseh against Ephraim, and Ephraim against Manasseh, and they together against Judah. For all this His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still.’ When we are thus one against another, the anger of the God is not turned away from us, and we may fear His hand will …
Concrete Secularism
The last chapter of Darryl’s book is obviously the one in which he steps up, wraps up, and sums up, and of course it is also the place where some of our more obvious disagreements come to the fore. Darryl’s basic assumption is that the coming of Christ ushered in a new relationship between church …
Grit, Grime and Grease Are All Most Real
The heroin addict “was under the influence of the idea that some aspects of reality are more real than others: that the seedy side of life is more genuine, more authentic, than the refined and cultured side—and certainly more glamorous than the bourgeois and respectable side. This idea could be said to be the fundamental …
Not the Right Color
“To father our wicked divisions upon religion is no other than to bring down the Holy Ghost in the likeness of a dove to be like a vulture or a raven” (Burroughs, Irenicum, p. 313).
Compassionate Conservativism Isn’t Either One
Darryl’s next chapter, “The Dilemma of Compassionate Conservatism,” provides a good overview of the recent interactions of the state and evangelicals, and the attempt to have the government provide help to various “faith-based” social agencies. Darryl does good work pointing out the corners that we have painted ourselves into, but his narrow conception of what …
Dancing Solipsistically
“On the dance floor itself, a great seething mass of people move like maggots in a tin. With so large a number of people crammed into so small a space, it is astonishing that they is no social contact among them. Most of the pairs do not even look into each other’s eyes; because of …
First Time for Everything
I understand that a bunch of you are going to be at the Evangelical Theological Society Conference in San Diego this week (Nov. 14-16). Well, as it turns out, Canon Press is going to be there as a vendor for the first time, and they are going to have books for sale. Now I understand …