Archive for the ‘Religion’ Category

Piped to pastures still

Lent is a time for Christians to give up what is good in order to be reminded of something better. Fasting and prayer are linked in Scripture, and it seems that fasting is a discipline which intensifies our prayers. It does so not because it makes us more holy to abstain from food, or purifies us of...
March 17th, 2010 | Protestant, Religion | Read More

Classics for the Contemporary Christian: Freud’s Non-Libidinal Rub

What do you want, purpose or happiness? If you don’t think the two pursuits are exclusive, take it up with Freud, who says as much in his treatise Civilization and its Discontents. “The idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system,” he said. “We will therefore...
March 15th, 2010 | Book Reviews, Culture, Religion | Read More

Classics for the Contemporary Christian: The Straits of Orthodoxy

I have a bone to pick with G.K. Chesterton about his book Orthodoxy. It took me a ridiculously long time to read. He just had to go and make every sentence so delicious and profound that I was forced to sit back after every line in order to laugh at his wit or furiously scribble notes. Think I’m...
March 3rd, 2010 | Book Reviews, Culture, Media, Religion, Worldviews | Read More

Everyday Justice and Lent

“Welcome, dear feast of Lent!” George Herbert, English country priest and poet wrote in Lent (1633). Last week, the western church entered the season of solemn preparation to remember Christ’s great sacrifice and victory over sin and death, and in a short while our eastern brothers and sisters...
February 23rd, 2010 | Book Reviews, Creation Care, Human Rights, Other, Religion, Social Justice | Read More

Declare the Word in Zion: America and the Middle East

Relations between the United States and the Middle East have always been complicated.  Given that the Middle East enjoys complicated relationships with every other region in the world as well—including itself—this should come as no surprise. On 9/11, however, many Americans were surprised.  In...
February 22nd, 2010 | Book Reviews, Foreign Affairs, Global War on Terrorism, Judaism, Media, Politics, Religion | Read More

On Reading the Bible

In an essay at Modern Reformation, David Nienhuis presents the rather bleak case that Americans are biblically illiterate. What’s worse, their Evangelical counterparts are little better. A professor of New Testament Studies at Seattle Pacific, Nienhuis begins his survey of the Christian Scriptures...
February 15th, 2010 | Evangelicals | Read More

Classics for the Contemporary Christian: Digging into Darwin

Darwin’s Dead and He Ain’t Coming Back…or so the Christian bumper sticker says. Personally, my favorite is the one of the Jesus fish eating the upside-down mutant fish with legs labeled ‘Darwin’. In the Jesus vs Darwin showdown, apparently survival of the fittest is true...
February 3rd, 2010 | Art & Literature, Book Reviews, Intelligent Design, Religion, Science | Read More

Christmas, God With Us

And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.  This census first took place while Quirinius was governing Syria.  So all went to be registered, everyone in his own city. Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth,...
December 25th, 2009 | Religion | Read More

Intentional Ambiguity: Telling it Slant

In the recent inaugural episode of Barak Wright’s arts and culture podcast, The Sandbox Monthly, Ken Myers talked about the dearth of genuine speech on the radio. Real conversation is full of starts and stops, hesitations, and the kind of awkwardness not found in the canned speech of radio personalities,...
December 7th, 2009 | Art & Literature, Logic & Rhetoric, The Gospel | Read More

In Defense Of Complementarianism: A Response To Allen Yeh (Part 3)

In my last post I gave several theological arguments designed to undermine the presuppositions of egalitarianism, show that Christianity is inherently patriarchal, and prove that there does not need to be any inherent opposition between equality and hierarchy. Now I will examine three important Biblical...
December 3rd, 2009 | Culture, Evangelicals, Protestant, Religion | Read More