WHY WORSHIP SERVICES ARE BORING, by Mike Glenn People who know me know I love college football and I love one college football team more than any other. Growing up in Alabama during the time of legendary coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, I have been a serious fan of the Crimson Tide since childhood. Friends know not to call me if the Crimson Tide is on TV because I won’t answer the phone. Friends who are watching the game with me... Read more

Earlier this year I looked at the first several chapters in Elaine Ecklund’s new book with Christopher Scheitle: Religion vs. Science: What Religious People Really Think. After looking at the issue of creationism and evolution it moved to the back burner. It appears timely to return, however, and look at the next chapter “Religious People are Climate Change Deniers.” Certainly evangelical Christians have this reputation in at least some circles. The statement is not true, although it is necessary to... Read more

In his new book, How New is the New Testament?, Don Hagner carries on the good fun at Fuller Seminary in responding kindly to John Goldingay’s Do We Need the New Testament? Hagner says this about the famous saying of Jesus, which reads: Matthew 13:51-52: Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.” And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his... Read more

James Bryan Smith, whom I consider one of North America’s leading voices on spiritual formation, directs The Apprentice Institute in Wichita KS and his program is connected to Northern Seminary’s DMin program in spiritual formation. I have myself participated in their program for three years and I come away blessed each time. James Bryan Smith’s trilogy — The Great and Beautiful series — is followed in the way only James Bryan Smith can write, in the Magnificent series. These are books for groups... Read more

I believe in … the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. The Apostles’ Creed ends on a note of hope, bringing the brief synopsis of the biblical story to a close. Christian hope culminates in the age to come, when the heavens and earth are restored and we live in resurrection bodies – immortal, not subject to decay. The reality of resurrection and life everlasting is more than personal salvation. It is victory over death. It is assurance... Read more

NYReview of Books, by Bill McKibben: Though it was published at the beginning of October, Global Warming of 1.5°C, a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is a document with its origins in another era, one not so distant from ours but politically an age apart. To read it makes you weep not just for our future but for our present. The report was prepared at the request of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at... Read more

Reading Revelation well means reading it in light of the End of all Ends, which means in some ways learning to read it backwards. It’s too easy to equate a book like this with our penchant for inductive arguments, but Revelation won’t cooperate. The End of Revelation is the point from the very beginning. To wait, unless you are engulfed in reading it as if for the first time, is to risk not knowing where it’s headed. Once you know... Read more

A book-loving family we are. (Thanks Ben.) The little Puritanism we all need: There was only one way to “avoid this shipwreck,”  in Winthrop’s words: “We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.” Doing that would encourage discovery that God would “command a blessing upon us in all our ways.” Massachusetts could... Read more