Do You Believe in Magic?

Okay, so it is a bit disturbing when the head transubstantiationist says that we need not believe in magic. Now I grant that his subject was not the Lord’s Supper, but rather creation and evolution, but still. His subject was God’s relationship to the world, which is relevant in all things. We must keep in …

Something to Use, Something to Risk

I have written critically in the past about James Davison Hunter’s approach to not really changing the world. In the last analysis, his tag phrase “faithful presence” ought to be a means to victory, not a goal in itself. If we make it a goal, it is as though the coach settles for getting his …

Five Yards of Truth

“The rationalism that we inherited from the Enlightenment has trained us all to think that everything that we really ‘know’ is that which can be objectively measured and doled out in credit hours. We have created a great illusory mechanism for making ourselves think that we know how people actually know things. And we identify …

On Being Too Hard on the Christians

I remember a commercial from many years ago that featured a football coach in the locker room at half time, and he was chewing out his team in a royal way. They had missed that tackle, they had screwed this up, they had failed to do something else, and so on. Finally, after a good …