I got this question from a reader. An answer could take up a book — or a series of books — or at least a chp in a book, but I’ll give it a few lines. Does the gospel include somehow not only good news of God renewing all of creation in Jesus, but also in living it out the call to humankind in Jesus to again be stewards of earth? We begin with a problem. For most people, the... Read more
Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith has a new book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. As is the norm he is out giving interviews and building interest in the book. In an interview at AVClub he outlines his purpose in writing the book and some of his conclusions. In this latest offering Harris tackles the question of morality. He finds the abdication of moral framework by science and scientists to be unfortunate to say the least. Such an abdication leaves a place for religion. This is something that Dr. Harris finds regrettable. Read more
So what is forgiveness? Sharon Baker, in her new book (Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught About God’s Wrath and Judgment), asks this question and makes this point: In serving retributive justice, the offense would be held on to tightly, not forgiven unless and until the offender balanced the accounts through payback of some kind. In that case, there would be nothing to give away, nothing to release, nothing to forgive; the debt incurred by the offense would have... Read more
A few years back a student of mine showed me a tattoo, asked me what I thought, and I informed him that he had some mistakes — it was in Greek and the student didn’t know Greek. But it was a really cool idea for a tattoo. By the way, I don’t have one. So, today I get a letter from a student and I wonder what you would give him for advice: How would I go about making sure... Read more
The questions we are led to ask are, Why does the educational emphasis on tolerance not work better? No country in the world emphasize tolerance more than we do. Teaching now about bullying is a great idea, but will this be effective? Elizabeth Scalia, in First Things: The recent, tragic, suicides of eighteen-year-old Tyler Clementi and fifteen-year-old Phoebe Prince—both bullied beyond their endurance by contemporaries, both unable or unwilling to admit into their confidence an authoritative person who might have... Read more
In the last decade we have been pressed from a variety of angles and thinkers (Robert Wuthnow, Christian Smith, Jeffrey Arnett, Jean Twenge) to consider and then reconsider ministries to young adults, and by this I mean 18-30 yr olds. For awhile folks believed in the “church within a church” model, and some said that wasn’t working, and then others — like Wuthnow — said “You better think about that again.” I want to go on record supporting a separable,... Read more
Written by a theologian in 1907, and scholarship has strengthened the observations: “The savage man has a savage God; the cruel man has a cruel God; the effeminate man has an effeminate God; while the good man lifts up holy hands to a God who rewards goodness” (37). So we read a quotation in Paul Froese and Christopher Bader, America’s Four Gods: What We Say about God–and What That Says about Us. Our earliest childhood images of God determine or... Read more
From CSM: In Europe, some countries have attempted to pay Africans and others to head back home, while Israelis are legislating against immigration in the name of demographic survival. Across continents, countries have closed doors on vulnerable refugees, and, in some places, nativism has reached such heights that urban residents even want their own rural migrants banished outside city limits. Anti-immigrant sentiment, of course, has been a recurring theme throughout history. Just look at the reaction that boatloads of Irish... Read more
From Barna’s newest study, but click the link to see the whole report: David Kinnaman, who directed the research project for Barna Group, mentioned that the study “confirmed many spiritual assumptions about various regions of the country. The South hosts many of the nation’s Christians, while the West and Northeast play to more secular stereotypes. “However, one of the underlying stories is the remarkably resilient and mainstream nature of Christianity in America. Nearly three out of four people call themselves Christians,... Read more
In my last post on Being Human After Darwin I commented on Francisco Ayala's essay on the characteristics that make us human. The suggestion is that our "humanness" is not at its root reducible to chemistry, physics, or even biology. Rather the things that make us human are abstract properties related to mind and to culture. We stand on the shoulders of those who came before, not simply in our biological composition, but more importantly and more profoundly in our knowledge, our understanding, and our culture, in the knowledge of good and evil, in the awareness that things could be better. We are human collectively and in the context of culture. Sure - one can look for chemical, physical, and biological roots that give rise to our capacity for culture and abstract thought, but there has been something of a phase transition. We are not simply smarter animals. Exactly how this came about I don't know - or I should say I don't know the mechanism used to bring this about. However it happened it is, I think, an important part of the biblical concept of humans created in the image of God, part of the mission, purpose of God in creation. Read more
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