From CNN.com: (CNN) — A Syriac Orthodox archbishop in Britain called for all Christians in Iraq to leave the country Sunday, one week to the day after gunmen stormed a Catholic church in Baghdad. Some 50 people were killed and 75 wounded in the attack at the Sayidat al-Nejat church last week, including women, children and two priests. Archbishop Athanasios Dawood slammed the Iraqi government for not doing enough to protect the rights of minorities and urged Christians to quit... Read more
I am traveling this week and so will delay the next post on Theology After Darwin. I want to take a bit of a break and put up a question about our church and the way we deal with questions, problems, and conflict. Last spring I linked to the talks given at the 2010 Wheaton Theology Conference with particular attention to the interaction with N.T. Wright and his book Jesus and the Victory of God. The best talk of the conference, however, (my vote anyway) was not on JVG, but rather the talk by Kevin Vanhoozer "Wrighting the Wrongs of the Reformation" on the interface between Wright's work on Justification and reformed theology. I've listened to it on my commute several times over the last six months including again just this last week. Perhaps the best part of the talk is Vanhoozer's concluding summary which is a call for dialogue and his outline of the dialogic virtues. Read more
Robert Putnam and David Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, sketch the facts when it comes to women in American religious communities, and here’s a major conclusion: Religious Americans have largely accepted the gender revolution, at the same time that many of them, especially evangelicals, staunchly resist the sexual revolution. Put differently, when it comes to women in ministry and participating more in church leadership there is no evidence of a slippery slope among evangelicals. When you... Read more
From CNN.com: (CNN) — Twinkies. Nutty bars. Powdered donuts. For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate one of these sugary cakelets every three hours, instead of meals. To add variety in his steady stream of Hostess and Little Debbie snacks, Haub munched on Doritos chips, sugary cereals and Oreos, too. His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most — not the nutritional value of the food. The... Read more
From Nick Kristof at NYTimes: The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana. C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531... Read more
One of the reasons I wrote One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow is because so many parents have said this to me and then asked the big question: My son or my daughter is a Christian but has no use for church.What can I do about it? My conservative estimate is that I’ve been asked this 200 times. The answer is not simple. I tell them church is not just important but it is the locus of what God is doing... Read more
What has happened to your reading habits ever since the rise of the internet, blogs, Facebook and Twitter? Ten years or so ago I wasn’t doing much on the internet other than a few e-mails. I spent evenings reading classics literature (like Euripides) and essayists (like Samuel Johnson), we watched sports, and work was mostly work and home was mostly home. That has changed significantly since the rise of internet and my own participation in that world with the Jesus... Read more
Questions for the post: Are there unnamed women in your church? Are their ministries made known? Are names made known? Furthermore, is there a silencing of the ministry of women in the history of the church in your pulpit and in your Bible/education classes? Put together, while many today decry the unnamed women of the Bible, is there a vibrant and viable presence of women in your church? Are we continuing the “unnaming” by a “silencing”? From CBE’s newsletter. There’s... Read more
Read this, from WaPo: Some numbers and trends that jump out most: * Catholic voters broke 53 to 45 percent for the GOP, a reversal from 2008, when they supported the Democrats by a 55 to 42 percent margin. * White Catholics in particular supported the GOP 58 percent to 40 percent; two years ago, they backed the GOP by a narrower 52 to 46 percent margin. *Republicans also gained the support of 59 percent of Protestants, up six points... Read more
Tom Wright’s newest book is called Small Faith–Great God. The new book is the re-issue of a book published originally in 1978 and it is a book of Tom’s I had never heard of, nor can I remember Tom referring to it in any of his other books. The book could be a welcome Christmas present, or just a book to sit around near your reading chair so you can sit down a read a chapter in a quiet spell.... Read more
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