Theology That Bites Back
Twenty years ago or thereabouts, Christian worldview seminars for young people were all the thing. The erosion of centuries of cultural consensus had become generally apparent, and so a number of organizations and churches threw themselves into the task of helping young people—who were obviously going to be bringing up their children in bizarroworld—to know …
The situation described in the following letters continues to be entirely fictitious, including persons, names, crimes, sins, relationships, circumstances and all particulars. The kind of situation that is described, however, is all too common and my hope is that biblical principles applied to this fictitious scenario may be of some help to individuals tangled up …
Do you want to know what is wrong with Christian cultural engagement? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. Are you sure you want to know? I do have a view on this. The problem with Christian cultural engagement is that it is gayer than the organists’ slippers down at Barry Manilow Presbyterian. That’s what’s …
Here are my notes for the talk I gave last night at the Grace Agenda. Introduction: Protestantism is thought by many to be a cold and austere thing, a tangle of negations, a deracinated approach to Christian faith, something that for two cents will slip into etiolated liberalism. Etiolated is what grass looks like when …
So The Washington Post did a profile on the wife of our vice-president, Karen Pence, and it came out that Mike Pence followed a variation of the “Billy Graham rule,” in that he would never eat alone with a woman who was not his wife, and he would never attend an event where alcohol was …
Allow me to begin this brief meditation by urging everyone to calm down. Okay, I grant this intro may have worked some people up all by itself. Let’s begin again, shall we? There is nothing here that should be a cause for alarm, but given the times in which we live, there will likely be …
In the next chapter, Rod Dreher outlines a modern description of and rationale for the Benedictine order. And in the particulars, he says a number of wise and good things. Dreher sees one of the most essential things. “We need to embed ourselves in stable communities of faith” (Loc. 760). And living by rule is …
Introduction: Sometimes, after I have thrown a Molotov cocktail or two, meaning by this an incendiary adjective, or hot incandescent metaphor, a number of my friends who follow this blog have counted to twenty-five, muttering to themselves all the while that they know there is going to be a follow-up post, one that will seek …
It is not uncommon for me to conduct wedding ceremonies, and one of the questions I usually ask the couple during the premarital counseling is what the composition of the assembly is likely to be. When I preach, everybody is there more or less voluntarily, and they know what they are likely to be getting. …
Introduction: There are only two “ways,” two fundamental religions in the world. One of them feeds people, and the other one eats people. We see this contrast in vivid relief in the juxtaposition that Mark gives to the death of John the Baptist. That sad but typical episode is followed immediately by the feeding of …
