We are in a conversation and discussion about John Walton’s (professor at Wheaton) new book, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate. (By the way, if you’d like a wonderful and God-shaped exposition of Genesis 1-3, I suggest the brand new book by Marva Dawn called In the Beginning, God: Creation, Culture, and the Spiritual Life .) Now back to John Walton … Proposition 3: “Create” concerns functions. We return now to the question we... Read more
A huge issue has arisen amongst evangelicals: social justice and social action have become front, left and center — in shaping our behaviors and in understanding the gospel … and Patrick Mitchel, from Ireland, we get a pushback that can make us think again. The issue is one of “how much continuity is there between now and the kingdom?” I’ve been thinking about the link between eschatology and social action recently. One line of thinking, that can be called the... Read more
Wow, did you see this piece in CT? It’s by Mark Regnerus. Indeed, over 90 percent of American adults experience sexual intercourse before marrying. The percentage of evangelicals who do so is not much lower. In a nationally representative study of young adults, just under 80 percent of unmarried, church- going, conservative Protestants who are currently dating someone are having sex of some sort. I’m certainly not suggesting that they cannot abstain. I’m suggesting that in the domain of sex,... Read more
I had a riot reading Ammon Shea’s Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages . There are two parts to this book — there is the personal story of the experience of reading 8-10 hours a day, holed up in a library in NYC, consuming large quantities of espresso — he says a thermos full by noon on most days — and getting headaches from all that reading. Then there is his deposit of words from each letter... Read more
This is the most important “mission” text in the history of the Church: When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak... Read more
Twitter was down this morning for quite awhile. (I just saw this on the news.) Did it impact you at all? Has Twitter become part of your job or your connections so that it an outage like this disrupts you? Are you increasingly relying on Twitter for anything? Etc. Thoughts? Read more
We finish off this series on Alister McGrath’s book A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology with a brief look at his conclusions, tying his major themes together. First a reiteration of what a robust natural theology is not (according to McGrath at least): According to McGrath the interplay between science and faith – the development of a robust natural theology – is not the quest for empirical evidence for the existence of God. It is... Read more
Strident critics of “religion” today would like us to imagine a society without religion and to begin constructing a society without religion. David Bentley Hart, in chapter one of his new book, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies , takes on “The gospel of unbelief” and puts to the test the underlying assumptions that are work in the critics of religion. He comes out swinging: “But atheism that consists in entirely vacuous arguments [and he’s pointing at... Read more
I recently published an essay inspired by JRR Tolkien’s marvelous short story called “Leaf by Niggle.” I hope you can read it … and you can comment here. Read more
How do you know if your car counts as a clunker? Read more
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