Jesus Creed
We have not had good access for a few days, but here’s a picture of one the little puffins we spent Wednesday with. Read more
We have not had good access for a few days, but here’s a picture of one the little puffins we spent Wednesday with. Read more
BioLogos held a workshop at Gordon College last week – well attended and well worth the time from what I hear. Some 50-70 people were in attendance, mostly college professors. Several regular readers of this blog were at the workshop. One who was there told me that it was a huge success, with many good conversations throughout. I was traveling, at science conferences myself, or might have looked into attending. (If I hadn’t been traveling I would have noted this:... Read more
The introduction to a series on William P. Brown‘s new book, The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder, started a little slow. The formula of the book shows a trend most notable in Chs. 3-9 where the seven creation texts are considered, the relation between science and scripture seems almost concordist – while always denying a concordism. The ancient authors did not know modern science and it was not revealed to them yet Brown... Read more
This opinion piece by Lee Dye from abcNews meshes well with several of the recent topics of discussion – including the extensive discussion of Rodney Stark’s book What Americans Really Believe, the post on Living in Denial, and the ever heated consideration of global warming. Global Warming and the Pollsters: Who’s Right? Is the glass half empty, or half full? Public opinion polls on global warming seem to be all over the map these days. A Gallup poll in March... Read more
This is an incredible series being offered to us by Matt Edwards: a nine part summary and response to Douglas Campbell’s mega-book, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul . Thanks to Matt Edwards. The Deliverance of God 7–Problems of Conversion in Justification Theory We are evaluating Douglas Campbell’s rereading of Romans 1-4 as presented in The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul. In the book, Campbell rejects “justification theory” (JT), the... Read more
When you “join” your church or “profess your faith” or “get baptized” or complete your confirmation — depending on your church orientation — what are you asked to do? Are you asked to tell your story of faith? What is required? I’m reading Patricia Caldwell’s exceptionally-researched and well-written study, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture) , while in Ireland and it details the “relation” (spiritual autobiography) that the Puritans were... Read more
Marilynne Robinson is best known as a novelist for Gilead, Housekeeping, and Home. Her most recent book, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, takes a stab at something different – but not something new – the question of the Human Mind and the importance of experience. This is something of a science and religion book, an attempt to probe the weakness of secular materialism through consideration of the marvel of the human... Read more
One of the more interesting studies in the What Americans Really Believe is the study on Faith and Politics. Rodney Stark is not going to make friends with his opening sentence, and he certainly doesn’t try to probe why the accusations are made, but he gets the ball rolling with this: “Evangelicals are the new scapegoats of liberal American culture” (149). Thus, 53% of American professors admit to having negative feelings toward Evangelicals; 3% feel this way about Jews and... Read more
One of the trends many of us have heard and repeated is the decline of religion in America, and one of the indicators was the rise in surveys of those who called themselves “irreligious” or checked a box that said “no religion.” Another topic that is covered in What Americans Really Believe. The conclusions reached by the Baylor Surveys are worth paying attention to. First, in the 1940s through the 1980s about 6-7% of Americans said they were irreligious. But in... Read more
This is an incredible series being offered to us by Matt Edwards: a nine part summary and response to Douglas Campbell’s mega-book, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul . Thanks to Matt Edwards. The Deliverance of God 6–The Inexplicability of Faith in Justification Theory We are evaluating Douglas Campbell’s rereading of Romans 1-4 as presented in The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul. In the book, Campbell rejects “justification theory” (JT),... Read more
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