The Three Journeys of the Christian Liberal Arts

Last updated on: May 1, 2017 at 9:43 pm By Chris Gehrz

Over the weekend I gave the keynote address for the annual Honors Symposium at Crown College, a Christian and Missionary Alliance school west of Minneapolis. (Thanks to Michial Farmer for inviting me to speak!) Here’s a slightly abridged version of my remarks. There are many ways we could talk about the importance of the liberal arts in a Christian setting like this. I should probably share statistics on salary and employment, or quotations about citizenship and civic virtue. But the most liberal artsy... Read more

Languages of Command

Last updated on: April 29, 2017 at 7:58 am By Philip Jenkins

I posted recently about how people in many (most) societies mix and match different languages, usually in a situation where one language is much more esteemed and respectable than another. Often, the way such languages are used tells you a lot about that society, in terms of social status and prestige, power relations and ethnic interactions. And as in my earlier post, modern day examples point to realities in ancient societies. Language speaks power. You see that phenomenon today in... Read more

People Like Us

Last updated on: April 28, 2017 at 2:05 pm By Philip Jenkins

Earlier this year, President Trump complained about the media’s failure to pay due attention to Islamist terrorist attacks, and the administration offered a specific list of such events. In some cases, his complaint was unfair, but the list did include many overseas attacks known only to experts, and largely ignored by media. In turn, critics protested about the biases of the Trump list, which ignored most crimes against non-Western victims – incidents in Pakistan, for instance, where Islamists killed dozens... Read more

Keller and Coulter, Orthodoxy and Heresy

Last updated on: April 26, 2017 at 2:07 pm By johnturner

Most of you have no doubt heard about this spring’s Kellerite controversy at Princeton Theological Seminary. At first, PTS decided to award high-profile pastor and prolific author Tim Keller its 2017 Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Witness. In keeping with the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) to which Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church belongs, Keller opposes the mainline Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s stances on the ordination of women and LGBT individuals. More generally, he espouses the complementarian theology... Read more

“What do Eastern Orthodox Christians believe about…?”

Last updated on: April 25, 2017 at 9:57 pm By Chris Gehrz

As evangelicals pay more attention to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, guest blogger Matt Miller reviews a significant new collection of primary sources from that ancient tradition. Read more

Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages

Last updated on: April 24, 2017 at 4:39 pm By Thomas Albert Howard

Although they were infrequent affairs, formal debates between Christians and Jews sometimes took place in the Middle Ages—even if the deck was often stacked against the Jews. For a research project, I have been reading about two of these: the Paris Disputation of 1240 and the Barcelona Disputation of 1263. The former took place at the royal court of Louis IX in Paris in June of 1240. With assurances of protection from the crown, four leading rabbis, led by Rabbi... Read more

Remembering the Armenian Genocide

Last updated on: April 26, 2017 at 3:52 pm By Chris Gehrz

In the middle of World War I, hundreds of thousands of Armenians died in the first genocide of the 20th century. But some survived — including the grandmother of Chris' pastor and co-author. Read more

Of Slavs, Slaves, Vikings, and Genetics

Last updated on: April 21, 2017 at 6:39 pm By Philip Jenkins

I recently had a DNA test to help trace my ancestry, and the result surprised me. The larger story might shed light on one of the grimmest and most forgotten horrors of European history, an era of brutal slave trading. By way of background, my known genealogy is very straightforward indeed. It shows close to 100 percent Welsh – not just Welsh, but one specific bit of south Welsh. That means mainly West Glamorgan, within a few miles of the... Read more

Please Stop Talking About “The Mother of All Bombs”

Last updated on: April 18, 2017 at 2:10 pm By Kristin Du Mez

Last Thursday the United States military dropped a bomb on ISIS targets in eastern Afghanistan. Not just any bomb: the largest non-nuclear bomb in America’s arsenal, the 21,000-pound GBU-43/B, also known as the MOAB—a Massive Ordinance Air Blast. Apparently also known as “the Mother of All Bombs.” And just like that, the media is abuzz with talk of this Mother of All Bombs. As if it were perfectly natural to ascribe maternal qualities to one of the most destructive devices... Read more

Are Women Human in Christian Academia?

Last updated on: April 18, 2017 at 10:44 pm By Beth Allison Barr

Recently, Karen Swallow Prior spoke out against the “Billy Graham rule”–married men distancing themselves from women to avoid temptation and the appearance of evil. For those of you who missed Prior’s article, she eloquently argued that good moral character is better than rigid behavioral rules. As she writes, “Virtue ethics relies on moral character that is developed through good habits rather than rules or consequences for the governing of behavior…Virtue ethics is better than the Billy Graham rule.” I actually just... Read more