From the Catholic News Agency Orlando, Fla., Jul 4, 2017 / 11:54 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The way we evangelize should grab the world by the shoulders and shake it out of its apathy, Bishop Robert Barron told a crowd of Catholic leaders Tuesday. Evangelization is especially urgent as the ‘nones’ – the number of the population who do not identify with a religion, continues to grow, he said. Bishop Barron, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and well-known... Read more

By John Frye Mary Karr is an author, poet, survivor of a catastrophic childhood in the southeast swamp of Texas called Leechfield, and one funny lady. She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University. I stumbled across her when looking for books of poetry on amazon.com. The title of her book Sinners Welcome caught my eye. I discovered that she lived a hard agnostic, verging on atheistic, alcoholic life. And like C. S. Lewis, Mary came... Read more

I began my career teaching seminary students, shifted to undergraduates for seventeen years, and now am teaching at a seminary again, at Northern Seminary (check out our DMin and MANT special cohorts). This move has driven me to think and rethink what seminary provides the church, or what the church provides the seminary. Today’s post offers ten reasons for going to seminary, and I know full well that many today both find seminary irrelevant and contend they are “successful” ministers... Read more

Source: WASHINGTON — Like many of the 100 or so freshmen who enrolled last August at Ron Brown College Preparatory High School, Zion Matthews had mixed feelings. He’ll freely admit, as will many of his classmates, that he ended up at the new, all-boys’ school for one reason: his mother suggested — no, insisted — that he apply. Ten months later, he concedes he is sold on the place, and he will tell you that girls “sort of like are the... Read more

Exodus 20 ties the command to remember the Sabbath directly to the Genesis 1 story of creation. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shall you labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God; you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male servant or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six... Read more

My Jesus Creed/Paraclete Press e-books are on sale this month at $3.99. The link is to the 10th Anniversary edition of Jesus Creed, but the titles can be seen in the image. Read more

538: As cities across the country pushed their minimum wages to untested heights in recent years, some economists began to ask: How high is too high? Seattle, with its highest-in-the-country minimum wage,1 may have hit that limit. In January 2016, Seattle’s minimum wage jumped from $11 an hour to $13 for large employers, the second big increase in less than a year. New research released Monday by a team of economists at the University of Washington suggests the wage hike... Read more

By Mitch East Before the semester began, I heard rumors about my theology class. Past students assured me the class would be difficult. “There’s so much reading,” they moaned. Some students mourned the harm done to their GPA before taking the class. But despite all the warnings, everyone said the class was worth it. So I felt timid, but intrigued. For the special Master of Arts in New Testament at Northern, click this link. And the rumors were true. The... Read more

So the question Mike Bird is asking in his richly footnoted and discussion-centered new combination of various studies: An Anomalous Jew: Paul among Jews, Greeks, and Romans. The study combines studies of Scholarship on Paul, what Paul’s view of salvation means in the Jewish world, how Paul was always both an apostle to gentiles and Jews, how Galatians proves Paul was both salvation-historical as well as apocalyptic, the origins of “Paulinism” in the famous incident at Antioch (Gal 2:11–14), and how Paul... Read more