In between papers and readings for a January-term intensive class, I’ve been slowly working my way through Fleming Rutledge’s mammoth book The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Eerdmans, 2015). Arguably Rutledge’s magnum opus, this book has received extremely high critical praise over the last year (it came out near the end of 2015). It even won the coveted “Book of the Year Award” from Christianity Today. I’m only about 150 pages in, but so far it is living... Read more

I have a tendency to say things that confuse people. I identify as an evangelical Christian (though, in the wake of the presidential election, I’ve had to qualify that quite a bit, usually in the form of saying I am a “classical” or “N. T. Wright-style evangelical;” but I digress), while at the same time defending what are often considered to be “liberal” social causes, such as Black Lives Matter. I even wrote a whole defense of  why I did... Read more

Tim Keller is one of my favorite preachers and public Christian voices. He has a way of conveying classic Christian belief and doctrine in a compelling way to post-Christendom, pluralist audiences. While, as a Wesleyan, I would differ with him on certain topics particularly cherished by the Calvinist tradition (yes, orthodox Wesleyan-Arminians do believe in predestination; we just believe it plays out quite differently than our Calvinist brothers and sisters do), all things considered, Keller is among the best representatives... Read more

Scot McKnight is one of my favorite New Testament scholars and theologians. He is coming to Asbury Seminary later this semester to speak and I cannot wait! McKnight’s work over the years has been a major influence in my own faith and scholarly development. His short, yet very powerful essay, Junia is Not Alone (Patheos Press, 2011), basically opened the door for me to become an egalitarian evangelical. He and others like Ben Witherington, Craig Keener, and N. T. Wright have provided... Read more

Travel is such a pain for multiple reasons. Of course one of these is that I sometimes cannot get to posting anything on here for a whole week, what with travel times, adjusting new schedules, restocking on groceries after being out of town for two weeks, etc. But I digress. I have been very slowly—due to the aforementioned holiday season travels, as well as reading through about four other books—working my way through Kevin Vanhoozer’s latest book, Biblical Authority After Babel.... Read more

I just finished reading Shūsaku Endō’s powerful novel, Silence. After hearing about the book from Makoto Fujimura in an interview about his own book interacting with Endō’s work, Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering, and seeing that Martin Scorcese was making a film adaptation (which I can’t wait to see when gets a nationwide release on Jan. 13th), I figured I should read the book for myself. All the acclaim surrounding Endō’s novel is true. Endō was a Japanese Catholic, and he wrote... Read more

America is a weird place. It is a country that was founded upon Enlightenment principles of reason and deism (no, it was not founded as an explicitly Christian nation, despite what many revisionist “historians” would have you believe), yet on a popular level it has been and remains extremely religious. Evangelicals (sociologically speaking; defining “evangelical” in a theological sense has become ever more difficult to do) have been a huge cultural and political force in this regard, especially since the... Read more

Ross Douthat is one of the premier Christian journalist working today, in my humble opinion. Douthat (a conservative Roman Catholic Christian) is a very perceptive and clear writer on religion, culture, politics, and other related subjects. His book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Free Press, 2012), is one of the best contemporary assessments of American religion that I have read in recent memory. Douthat continues this journalistic excellence with a recent column in the New York Times,... Read more

The Christmas story is something we always run perilously close to loosing sight of in the midst of the holiday shuffle. We remember it to be sure. We love to see manger scenes all over our cities and towns. We love to “remember the reason for the season” by remembering and celebratign Christ’s birth. But still, we often forget the import of the Word taking on flesh and dwelling among us. We forget why we really celebrate. For the Christmas story is... Read more

I am still alive! Thanks to finals and road-tripping from Kentucky to Oklahoma, I haven’t been able to post anything since last Monday. But I’m back now and am hitting the ground running. I’ve just started reading Kevin Vanhoozer’s recent book, Biblical Authority After Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity (Brazos, 2016). I’ve only read through the introduction so far, but Vanhoozer has already put forward some fascinating analysis and proposals. The overall purpose of the... Read more