I was delighted to see my colleague Tommy Kidd writing so enthusiastically about G K Chesterton, and especially about The Man Who Was Thursday, one of my absolute favorite books. Chesterton’s other novels are also very well worth reading, and each in its way is quite as bizarre as Thursday. Who knew, for instance, that as far back as 1914 he would write a novel depicting the Islamic takeover of Great Britain? I draw the following from my book God’s... Read more
This Sunday the preacher was talking about how the church sanctuary is a sacred place. It reminded me of a piece I wrote about five years ago called “Praise the Lord and Pass the Caffeine.” For those of you who have not seen it, or have not read it in its entirety, here it is. –JF I have never been much of a coffee drinker. When I was a teenager, this posed a few problems, since my father was a... Read more
Recently I read G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, A Nightmare (1908), a roller-coaster of a novel, full of surprises and thought-provoking theological reflections. (It is also, happily, one of the public domain titles available for free on Kindle.) I don’t want to summarize the book because The Man Who Was Thursday is best read the way I did — totally fresh. Going in, I knew Chesterton’s work, or at least I had read Orthodoxy, his most famous work. But I knew almost nothing about this particular... Read more
The prestigious magazine The Economist recently did a significant piece on the political and cultural attitudes of US evangelicals. Under the title “Evangelical Voters: Lift Every Voice”, it argued that “Growing numbers of non-white evangelicals and changing attitudes among younger Christians are reshaping the politics of American Christianity.” The article offers a number of examples of evangelicals who run contrary to existing stereotypes by their liberal activism, and explores the prospects for “a leftward turn for American Christianity.” Now, you... Read more
In the American Spectator, Mark Tooley discusses the recent General Conference of the United Methodist church in a piece called “United Methodists Transition from Liberal to Global.” The article’s main argument is not surprising in light of Mr. Tooley’s strongly conservative advocacy through the years. As often in the past, he says that liberal Western denominations are losing members fast because of their failure to teach a straightforward orthodox message, while Global South churches are growing and eventually will challenge... Read more
Hail happy land! hail happy state! Whose freeborn sons in safety meet… Come let us kneel before his face Devoutly supplicate his grace. I have sought to warn my daughter that royalty is not all it’s cracked up to be. Once Evelyn began dressing up one of her stuffed animals as a king (the “King of Starbucks,” as he used a Starbucks coffee holder for his crown), I took it upon myself to have said stuffed animal act like a... Read more
Professors are not supposed to attend the funerals of their students. But roughly one year ago today I was sitting in a funeral home in southern New Jersey mourning the death of Megan. She died on May 25, 2011 from complications related to her ten year battle with Lupus. She was 31 years old. Megan was the first student I worked closely with when I arrived at Messiah College in 2002. Megan’s enthusiasm for life, God, and the study of... Read more
Evangelical Christians have engaged in a robust, rancorous debate about hell in the past year. As I wrote in USA Today shortly after Osama Bin Laden’s death, this debate was precipitated partly by indiscreet comments about Bin Laden’s eternal destiny, and, more importantly, by the publication of Rob Bell’s Love Wins. Bell’s book strongly implied that because of the power of God’s love, no one would be condemned to everlasting torment in hell. [See my Patheos review of Love Wins here.] As with... Read more
It is eerie seeing your old home town suddenly becoming the center of a spiritual phenomenon. I am originally from Port Talbot in South Wales, a town that has lived through very hard times. Once intended as the cutting edge of European industry in the 1950s, Port Talbot became a classic boom town, at its peak employing some twenty thousand at its gargantuan steelworks. By the 1980s, though, that industry collapsed, leaving behind a rustbelt world that would be instantly... Read more
I am normally reluctant to link to articles that need a subscription, but I’ll make an exception here. The current Weekly Standard has a lengthy piece by Armin Rosen titled “Birth of a Nation: With American Evangelicals on the Ground in South Sudan.” By way of background, Sudan was for many years divided between its Arab and Muslim north, based in Khartoum, and a (black) animist and Christian south. Rebellions and civil wars produced twenty years of carnage, with a... Read more
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