The Gosnell Movie Indicates the Death of Old Media (A Guest Post)

Last updated on: February 5, 2019 at 8:32 pm By John Mark N. Reynolds

This is a guest post by Dr. Eric Holloway. Dr. Eric Holloway received a solid grounding in classical education at the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University. Eric continued schooling to complete a MSc in Computer Science at the Air Force Institute of Technology and a PhD in Computer Engineering at Baylor University. ————————————– Thanks to the second amendment, the US media cannot (legally) engage in positive censorship. However, they can engage in negative censorship by choosing what not to... Read more

Loss of Focus Harms Everything in the End

Last updated on: February 28, 2019 at 10:28 pm By John Mark N. Reynolds

Does theological liberalism kill everything it touches pulling it into a theological captivity to secularism? Reading “Black Liberation Theology” and the impact this movement had on African-American Christianity strongly supports the idea. Was “Black Liberation Theology” able to harness the power of a still mostly Evangelical African-American church to do good (great temporal good) only to leave that church hollowed out for the future? Historical Reminder Nobody inherits or forms a theology, or any intellectual idea, in a void. Culture... Read more

The Cross and the Lynching Tree (James H. Cone)

Last updated on: February 28, 2019 at 10:37 pm By John Mark N. Reynolds

The cross and the lynching tree are separated by nearly 2,000 years. Professor James H. Cone starts a must-read work with this fact and continues with the comparison. If you are my age, fifty-five at the time of writing, then your grandparents generation lived when the murder of an African-American was open and public spectacle. In its heyday, the lynching of black Americans was no secret. It was a public spectacle, often announced in advance in newspapers and over radios,... Read more

The Cross and the Lynching Tree: The Failure of Imagination

Last updated on: March 1, 2019 at 11:45 pm By John Mark N. Reynolds

Joining a team can bring on a dull imagination. We start thinking within the team culture and understanding ‘those people’ only by our team’s hot takes. With our opposition, we drop mics, not dialog. The failure of a world class (liberal) theologian like Rienhold Niebuhr to support desegregating his church is a sad lesson of the limits of compassion and the power of white supremacy. Niebuhr was a socialist and perhaps that shows another limitation to theological liberalism. He had too much... Read more

The Muse’s Favor (Let All Who Can Sing. . . Sing!) Priscilla Jane Thompson

Last updated on: February 26, 2019 at 11:00 am By John Mark N. Reynolds

When we limit beauty, we limit our ability to flourish as humans. A glory of the world God made is that beauty, objective beauty, is expressed in many different ways. One result of sin is an inability to see certain types of beauty. Merely seeing “common humanity” is not enough, we should be able to see the beauty in our fellow humans. Why? The beauty is real and failure to acknowledge reality is never a good idea. God has made... Read more

Thabiti M. Anyabwile on The Decline of African American Theology

Last updated on: February 24, 2019 at 7:15 pm By John Mark N. Reynolds

American Christian history has a powerful Reformed strain. Often other Christians, even those of us in the Orthodox Church, react to the Reformed American story and so it benefits us to know it. After all, most Americans have been and are some sort of Christian and our first intellectuals, men like Jonathan Edwards, were Reformed. Thabiti M. Anyabwile is a Reformed Christian, very much so, and he sketches a history of African American theology from that perspective in The Decline... Read more

Mary Weston Fordham is Awesome, but Unfashionable

Last updated on: February 24, 2019 at 2:34 pm By John Mark N. Reynolds

Want to be radical? Examine the worldview of Mary Weston Fordham as if it might be true. Fordham has the temerity to be the woman she wanted to be: African, American, Christian, Victorian. A great many Americans objected and still object to one or more of those characteristics. Mary Weston Fordham was brilliant at being herself against great odds. Booker T. Washington, also out of fashion, commended her work and she kept on writing poetry of the sort Victorian people,... Read more

Beloved (A Quibble about a Masterpiece by Toni Morrison)

Last updated on: February 22, 2019 at 12:46 am By John Mark N. Reynolds

People trained to know tell me Beloved by Toni Morrison is a classic. When creating a “must read” canon of Twentieth Century literature in English, the book makes the cut (and such choices are hard) in department after department. I will not question that judgment here. First, the book is beautifully written. Take just this one sentence: “Not quite in a hurry, but losing no time, Sethe and Paul D climbed the white stairs.” I enjoyed copying the sentence, admiring... Read more

Dusk or Hope Happens (Langston Hughes)

Last updated on: February 20, 2019 at 9:00 pm By John Mark N. Reynolds

Dusk Wandering in the dusk, Sometimes You get lost in the dusk- And sometimes not. Beating your fists Against the wall, You break your bones Against the wall— But sometimes not. Walls have been known To fall, Dusk turn to dawn, And chains be gone! We can always use hope, maybe more now that at other times, awash as we are in social media highlighting all that is bad, false, and ugly. Worse mayhaps is consumption of the humbug that... Read more

Learning from Anthony Bradley While Reading His Liberating Black Theology

Last updated on: February 20, 2019 at 8:50 pm By John Mark N. Reynolds

Anthony Bradley should be read. If he wrote it, read it. He is an unpredictable mind, because he is a thinker. If he ever takes one of those Internet quizzes that try to label your ideas, he may break the Internet. Professor Bradley’s* Liberating Black Theology taught me, challenged me, made me listen. In one way, I am sorry to comment, because that interrupts the listening and the learning. Learning from Professor Bradley: Two Tasks Liberating Black Theology does two important... Read more