By John Frye I am thankful the Apostle Paul talked about his own preaching. The startling connection Paul made was between his words and the power of the Holy Spirit. Gordon Fee writes, “Both the content… and the form of his preaching lacked persuasive wisdom and rhetoric; indeed, his preaching was more effective than that, Paul argues. It was accompanied by a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, evidenced by the conversion [of people]. And it was so, Paul adds, in... Read more

In his recent, technical, and not always well-written monograph, Jesus and Jewish Covenant Thinking (break the bank!), Finnish scholar Tom Holmen offers a new category through which we can process our “theories of Christian behavior.” In essence, Holmen contends that Jews sought for genuine covenant faithfulness and, attached to that seeking, each new group and movement developed a set of covenant path markers. Covenant path markers are specific behaviors — Sabbath, circumcision, food laws, tithing, fasting, divorce, oath-taking, companionship, the... Read more

Daniel Cosacchi: Among the many noteworthy additions to the Catholic magisterium within Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, was the introduction of the term “integral ecology.” In many ways, the term is meant to bring together the church’s longstanding teachings of “human ecology” and “environmental ecology.” In another way, however, what Pope Francis is trying to get across is the importance of integrity, or of being a whole community. In the case of integral ecology, Francis wants to make it... Read more

The book of Genesis stands at the front of the Bible and provides an account of origins, setting the stage for the exodus from Egypt and the foundation of Israel as the people of God. The book can be usefully divided into three sections: The primeval history of 1-11, the ancestor narratives of 12-36, and the story of Joseph in 37-50. Although this may seem obvious to the person who has studied the book or the Bible at length, it... Read more

David W. Congdon, ironically enough an associate editor at IVP, is attempting to revive the theology of Rudolf Bultmann for today’s theological, if not (progressive?) evangelical theological discussion. If evangelicals, one might say fairly, can find Barth suitable to historic evangelicalism perhaps also Rudolf Bultmann? Following his massive The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (Fortress), his new companion to Bultmann focuses on a description (and largely positive evaluation) of Bultmann’s theology. Congdon has mastered — if that is possible... Read more

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By Jonathan Storment For the past few weeks, I’ve been blogging through James K.A. Smith’s great little book “You Are What You Love” and today I want to end that series with one more observation. I have recommended this book to a lot of people. I think Smith is on to something that is good and needed. I also see a serious deficit in virtue and general confusion about what it means to be disciple of Jesus and why we,... Read more

Two years ago I wrote a lengthy post (below) on Richard Hays’ new book about reading the Bible backwards, and at the time Hays offered his Hulsean lectures as his complement book to his previous book Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. I am (more than) happy to announce that Richard Hays has now completed the original sketch in Reading Backwards with this new tome: Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels. It is not a brand new book after Reading Backwards but the... Read more

Madhu Krishnamurthy: When it comes to rescuing, no creature is too small for Lake Zurich firefighters — whether it’s a cat in a tree, deer on ice, or duckling in a pipe. A Lake Zurich Fire Rescue Department engine crew was dispatched Thursday morning to the scene of one such mishap for a brood of ducklings that had fallen down a storm drain near some Rand Road businesses. Using a small net borrowed from a nearby public works crew, the... Read more

Lisa Anne Auerbach: The architecture of modern megachurches — which is to say, box churches — is deserving a fair inspection, not least by those in Europe who know the grandeur of cultures and cities and nations who vested their money in worship-centered architecture. “I started photographing megachurches as an oppositional idea,” explainsLisa Anne Auerbach, a California photographer and artist. “I had been doing a series about small free-standing businesses [encapsulating] this idea of America: you’re an individual, you hang up... Read more