In his recent book Minds, Brains, Souls and Gods: A Conversation on Faith, Psychology and Neuroscience Malcolm Jeeves, emeritus professor of Psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, answers questions about psychology and neuroscience in the form of an e-mail conversation with a fictional undergraduate student. The questions posed by “Ben” represent the cumulative experience of  more than half a century interacting with students taking psychology.  Many of the questions came to Jeeves personally, others were suggested by... Read more

Jackson Wu teaches theology and missiology for Chinese pastors. He blogs at www. jacksonwu.org. Wu has also written Saving God’s Face: A Chinese Contextualization of Salvation through Honor and Shame (2013). Follow him on Twitter by clicking here. Is the Chinese Church Political? Let me introduce you to a new book called Christian Political Witness (IVP, 2014), edited by George Kalantzis and Gregory Lee. In the next few posts, I’ll offer a broad overview and critique of the book, i.e. a more traditional book... Read more

There are a few songs that I associate with a male voice and some with a female voice such that if a male sings Hosanna I don’t think it is right. The voice gets connected to the song somehow. Preaching is like this for many, many of us. How so? Many think preaching requires a man’s voice because the only voice some have heard is a man’s. For the familiarized, then,when a woman preaches it “just doesn’t sound right.” Church... Read more

“The church doesn’t need to provide nineteenth century answers to sixteenth century questions. The church should offer twenty-first century answers to first-century questions.”–N.T. Wright More and more, I find myself in a similar conversation. By more and more, I don’t mean weekly, I mean daily. The conversation I’m describing starts a hundred different ways but usually funnels to the same place: “Josh,” someone in my church community confesses or a friend will confide with a whisper, “…I just don’t know... Read more

Martin Thielen’s contention is that the solution to bad religion — marked by anger, judgmentalism, divisiveness, etc — is not no religion, or the religion of the Nones, but instead good religion. But what is good religion? Let me say that Thielen is a master storyteller and this book is filled with gracious stories. Filled with them. I love his story of the lady who put on a small wooden cross on the stacks of things she had to do... Read more

Churches are shrinking and the Nones are rising, so claims James Emery White in The Rise of the Nones. What kind of evangelism will close some of this gap? Maybe this is the best question: How has the church lost contact with the current young adults so that there is such a concentration of Nones today? White proposes the old-time evangelism of declaration or even community is giving way to cause. But is there more than joining in concern about causes? He... Read more

From Jack Levison: [Two] books are must-reads in light of Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah), which extends from Sunday evening until Monday evening, April 27-28. What these books do so well is introduce us to otherwise unnamed people who endured the Holocaust. The Family, which begins near Vilnius, Lithuania, exposes the quotidian lives of Jews caught between the power play of Russia and Germany. Riveting descriptions of people simply keeping life afloat during the Soviet and Nazi occupations are staggering in their simplicity;... Read more

Almighty and everlasting God, who in the Paschal mystery established the new covenant of reconciliation: Grant that all who have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body may show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. Read more