By Jonathan Storment Bruce Springsteen: “Everybody’s got a hungry heart.” Last week I started a series, blogging through James K.A. Smith’s brilliant little book, You are What You Love, and today I want to continue with the 2nd chapter, “You Might Not Love What You Think.” The premise of Smith’s book is that Christians are not good at making disciples of Jesus, because we have largely missed what it means to be human. During the past few hundred years, we’ve bought... Read more
The United States of America chose intelligently and rigorously not to have a national religion/faith. American Christians have not been so rigorous, even if intelligent. Instead of a national religion we have Americans of all persuasions seeking to express their viewpoints and claims and, at the same time, using the political process to implement those persuasions for the nation — even if only slightly cleverly disguised. Both Republicans and Democrats think their agendas and platforms are the most Christian while... Read more
Darryl Fears: The birds and the bees are telling humans about much more than sex, a new study released Thursday says. They are a harbinger of climate change, with species swapping habitats like a game of musical chairs as regions in Europe and the United States warm. Populations of American robins that winter in southern states are in decline there, but they are on the upswing in northern states that were once too cold. And European wrens are beating a... Read more
Robert Gebelhoff, at WaPo: It’s a tight race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in the Wisconsin Democratic primary, but Sanders has managed to gain a slight edge due to his support among young people — with more than 83 percent of college-age voters planning to vote for him. His lead among young people has been buoyed by his proposal to make public universities tuition-free, especially resonant in a state where the public university system recently underwent millions of dollars... Read more
Many of the most interesting topics at the interface science and the Christian faith fall in the realm of neuroscience, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. These are fields, it should be noted, that are in flux and undergoing rapid development. Much of the literature, especially the literature written for a popular audience reflects the inconsistencies of this rapid change. Chapter 3 of Matthew Nelson Hill’s new book Evolution and Holiness: Sociobiology, Altruism, and the Quest for Weslyan Perfection digs into the... Read more
Every time I look through the contributors to The Apostle Paul and the Christian Life: Ethical and Missional Implications of the New Perspective (ed. J. Modica, SMcK), I think that specific contributor’s essay was my favorite to read. Which brings to my “new favorite,” the essay by Patrick Mitchel, principal at Belfast Bible College and formerly at Irish Bible Institute. Mitchel brings a different angle — not just the Irish angle — to this discussion because he is a theologian and... Read more
Jeffrey Rediger and “miracles” movie: What are your thoughts? To doctors, events like the story that this girl’s mother (played in the film by Jennifer Garner) recounted in her memoir are impossible to explain. Scientists call them “spontaneous remission” or “placebo responses.” Religious people generally use a different word: “miracle.” I’m trained in both medicine and theology. I’ve been investigating the medical evidence in stories like these since 2003. And I can say unequivocally that much of physical reality, remarkable as it may... Read more
The Spectator, by Tim Stanley: All of this is doubly irritating in an age in which horoscopes are widely read and a significant slice of the population thinks Earth has been visited by aliens. The human race is no less credulous than it once was. It’s just that its taste in the fantastic has moved on. So we now live in a post-Christian society, surrounded by the archaeology of an almost forgotten faith. One of the jobs of Christians in... Read more
When I saw the title of her book — Neither Complementarian nor Egalitarian: A Kingdom Corrective to the Evangelical Gender Debate — and then saw that Craig Blomberg wrote a foreword and Lynn Cohick the afterword I had an odd response: “Sure, let’s see if there can be a Third Way approach.” Then the term “kingdom” caught my attention — not knowing how the author, Michelle Lee-Barnewall, might define “kingdom” — and the word “corrective” even more, so she had me... Read more
Robert Zaslow: After being turned down more than 100 times, Marcus, a homeless Minneapolis job-seeker with a criminal record, was just about to give up. Then he got a second chance to turn his life around. McDonald’s and various temp agencies wouldn’t even consider him due to his appearance and record. But when Marcus walked into Abi’s Cafe begging for money two weeks ago, owner Cesia Abigail decided to ask him why he didn’t have a job. “I see Marcus... Read more
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