If the earth had a ring like Saturn… The best ice cream parlors in the world — where there’s Blue Bell in Texas and don’t forget the piazza parlor in San Gimignano. Mal Green on preserving one’s reputation: “The seemingly relentless litany in recent church history of high-profile and no-profile Christian religious leaders being caught in the act of spectacularly transgressing some aspect of their own Judeo-Christian moral code has got me thinking that the Christian obsession (explicit and implicit) with... Read more

Kris and I are with Boz Tchividjian, a former prosecutor and one deeply committed to fighting injustices against children, on this one. There is blatant failure here to recognize the complicity of a leader in what transpired under his watch. God have mercy. From Boz Tchividjian: Earlier this week, I read the second amended complaint filed by eleven plaintiffs against SGM, two churches, and a number of individuals, including a man named CJ Mahaney.  I won’t go into the factual details... Read more

Ian Morgan Cron says St Francis. What say you? Who, in your estimation wins the all-time, “most incredible Christian in history” prize? Call me crazy, but I vote for the guy who holds birdbaths up in people’s gardens—St Francis of Assisi. I knew zero about St Francis until I went through a spiritual crisis a few years ago. I was burnt out on ministry, disillusioned with church, fed up with evangelical subculture, and tired of not being able to voice... Read more

David Ravenhill: How to stay balanced? May I suggest two principles: (1) Let the Bible say what it says and avoid providing your explanatory apparatus. (2) Let the Bible’s balance be yours. That is, teach or preach or absorb Gal 1-4 and 5-6, Romans 1-11 and 12-16, Matthew 5-7 and the soteriology of the Gospels.  What I find in grace overcooking are violations of both Principle 1 and 2. Someone wisely stated, “The church has suffered more from her exponents... Read more

A recent article in CT by Sharon Hodde Miller calls attention to the gender gap in evangelical seminaries, where the ratio is not as good as one might think. Here is a clip, and I add the numbers: 1. According to the Association of Theological Schools, during the 2012-2013 school year women accounted for approximately 37 percent of Protestant seminary students. [37%] 2. However this statistic is somewhat misleading, as it includes fields of study outside of the Master of Divinity... Read more

Michael Lind: Where do you see this in the Christian world? in the pastoral world? “Semantic infiltration” is a term coined by the foreign policy expert Fred Ikle and popularized by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Ikle defined it thus: Semantic infiltration means one undermines one’s own position in negotiations by adopting unknowingly the terms which the adversary “infiltrates.” As a conservative, Ikle drew most of his examples of semantic infiltration from liberal usages that became mainstream, like “affirmative action”... Read more

From Daniel Dennett: Dennett couldn’t be any more accurate but when it comes to persons of faith he rarely achieves this one. Just how charitable are you supposed to be when criticising the views of an opponent? If there are obvious contradictions in the opponent’s case, then you should point them out, forcefully. If there are somewhat hidden contradictions, you should carefully expose them to view – and then dump on them. But the search for hidden contradictions often crosses... Read more