Sleeping in Separate Bedrooms? The Anglican Compromise?

Last updated on: September 17, 2015 at 7:17 am By Scot McKnight

Stephen Castle: The creation of a lighter and looser relationship among the churches might be enough to allow Canterbury to maintain relations with the Episcopal Church and, say, provinces in African countries, which have encouraged their governments to criminalize homosexuality. The archbishop’s statement stressed that he was not in a position to dictate policy. “We have no Anglican pope,” he wrote. “Our authority as a church is dispersed, and is ultimately found in Scripture, properly interpreted.” His aides confirmed, however, that while... Read more

I Wish Pastors Knew … Part 1 (RJS)

Last updated on: September 17, 2015 at 6:23 am By RJS

Pastoring is a hard job. No question about this. People are messy and pain and suffering are quite real. I don’t want to criticize. But there are some things I wish pastors knew about life as a scientist, or for that matter about life as an academic across a range of disciplines. But first … Scot recently linked a book I (Still) Believe: Leading Bible Scholars Share Their Stories of Faith and Scholarship. Seeing Walter Moberly, whose book on Old... Read more

Some Questions about Heaven

Last updated on: September 16, 2015 at 10:38 pm By Scot McKnight

Heaven, what used to be the primary motivator for many to become a Christian or be faithful of a Christian, has fallen on hard times. I discuss each of these questions (below) in my new book, The Heaven Promise. I wonder what you think about heaven? But I’m not asking about just your theory. Instead, I want to come at this from a pastoral angle: What would you tell a seventeen year old Christian kid who discovers she has an incurable cancer?... Read more

Tim Keller’s Genius (by Jonathan Storment)

Last updated on: September 15, 2015 at 9:34 pm By Scot McKnight

Last week I started a series about Tim Keller’s new book Preaching, and today I would like to talk about what I considered the best part of not just his book, but of Keller’s actual ministry. Tim Keller’s genius is that he takes the context he lives in seriously. He has preached in Manhattan for several decades and no matter what you think about his theology, he has been, in my estimation, one of the best missionaries of evangelical Christianity.... Read more

At the Center of Christian Worship?

Last updated on: September 15, 2015 at 5:58 am By Scot McKnight

We learn from early Christian worship, not simply because some want to “get back” or “retrieve” the origins but because the earliest churches put into play what was inevitable to put into play. They had to practices certain things because those where the practices that expressed their faith. One could say those practices were their faith. In Andrew McGowan’s very fine book, Ancient Christian Worship, we will come across six practices (meal, Word, music, initiation, prayer, and time) and today we want... Read more

Talk to the Children

Last updated on: September 14, 2015 at 8:00 am By Scot McKnight

Cory Turner: As a surgeon, Suskind performed cochlear implants at the University of Chicago. The implant is a remarkable marriage of medicine and technology that can help even profoundly deaf children hear. But Suskind noticed that her young patients went on to develop language skills at wildly different rates. Some reached or surpassed grade-level. Some didn’t. Why In Suskind’s new book, Thirty Million Words: Building A Child’s Brain, she explains her personal journey toward the surprising answer: The kids who thrived... Read more

Isaiah and Jesus (RJS)

Last updated on: September 15, 2015 at 6:10 am By RJS

Luke 24 relates a story immediately following the resurrection account (image): Now that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them … He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken!... Read more

Honey, Honey, Honey

Last updated on: September 13, 2015 at 9:49 pm By Scot McKnight

Is Honey good for you? Or better than other options? Peter Whoriskey: Honey has an aura of purity and naturalness. Fresh air, birdsong, forests and meadows. High-fructose corn sweetener? Not so much. So you might think that honey is better for you. But a study published this month compared the health effects of honey and the processed sweetener and found no significant differences. “The effects were essentially the same,” said Susan K. Raatz, a research nutritionist at the USDA who conducted... Read more

Micro-aggressions: A New Morality?

Last updated on: September 13, 2015 at 9:58 pm By Scot McKnight

From Jonathan Haidt: I just read the most extraordinary paper by two sociologists — Bradley Campbell andJason Manning — explaining why concerns about microaggressions have erupted on many American college campuses in just the past few years. In brief: We’re beginning a second transition of moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have... Read more