There is a curious passage in Matthew’s gospel in which Jesus rebukes several cities. “Woe unto you, Chorazin!” he said, repeating the same for nearby Bethsaida and Capernaum (11.21, 23). Why? Because Jesus had performed miracles in each city and they ignored the wonders. They observed the miracles and did not repent. They failed to respond as they should have. But can we blame them? Right after upbraiding these cities, Jesus thanked God for hiding “these things from the wise... Read more
In the fall of 1956, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech and asked his audience to imagine that the Apostle Paul had penned an epistle to American Christians just as he had done nineteen hundred years before to believers in Rome, Galatia, and Colossae. What would he say? Since the apostle usually wrote to encourage and convict, what faults might he seek to correct? According to the imaginary letter that King presented, Paul took particular offense at disunity... Read more
There is nothing to me more beautiful than the Orthodox liturgy. Here is an example from the Cathedral of St. Panteleimon the Great Martyr in Abkhazia, which sits on the eastern side of the Black Sea. The service is compressed down to 10 minutes here to give viewers a taste of things. I can’t understand a whit of it, but I’m told the chanting is in both Abkhaz and Russian. Simultaneously arresting and soothing, it has the ability to transport... Read more
They don’t mix, if you’re looking for the answer up front. There are perhaps several reasons for this, but Alain de Botton offers one in The Wall Street Journal worth considering. Certain kinds of suffering are beneficial, even necessary for human flourishing, he says, particularly struggling through periods of anxiety and boredom. Porn diverts us from those struggles. “Our anxious moods are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss,” he says, “and so they need to be listened to... Read more
Oh, yes he did. After a 17-year-old boy wrote and said his dad was more interested in video games than mom, Robertson speculated about why. “It may be your mom isn’t as sweet as you think she is,” he said. “She may be kind of hard-nosed. . . .” When Robertson’s long-suffering cohost asked how he could blame the mother, he responded, “It’s easy to blame the mother” and continued: You know, a woman came to a preacher that I... Read more
Vandals desecrated a church and cemetery in the Galilee village of Kafar Bir’em, spraying graffiti and dousing the building with incendiary fluid just days after Christmas. The graffiti included the word “Revenge” in both English and Hebrew, racist language, stars of David, and a cross next to a phallic symbol. The same village suffered a similar attack several weeks prior, according to the Committee for the Uprooted of Kafar Bir’em. Haggai Matar reported on the desecration here. Acts of terrorism... Read more
After watching Peter Jackson’s Hobbit, the usually soft-spoken Frank Schaeffer compared it to a botched circumcision. “[T]hey left everything they should have taken and took what they should have left,” he said, quoting Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. “The spirit of the book has been almost entirely lost and replaced by a movie that looks as if it was made to spin off theme park rides and videogame derivatives rather than to tell the story as written in the beloved... Read more
A writer for Relevant magazine is peeved that people like C.S. Lewis. Seriously. “I’m annoyed,” he said, “with the public perception and exultation that has long outlasted him.” While granting that Lewis deserves credit for his academic, literary, and theological work, the writer pointed out that the Oxford don “was born in 1898 . . . a decade after the setting of Back to the Future III. Annie Oakley was still the most popular woman in America. In 1898, the... Read more
While reading Alan Wolfe’s helpful book, The Transformation of American Religion, I was reminded of a song by the band Jacob’s Trouble, “The Church of Do What You Want To.” It’s from their 1989 album, Door Into Summer. The satire works because it channels a powerful rip current in contemporary Christianity. It also works because it’s true to some degree of most of us. Just listen to the chorus: “The Church of do what feels good, Baby, and believe what... Read more
Peering through the most recent edition of the peerless Books and Culture, I came across a three-quarter page ad for Beeson Divinity School. Forgive me, but I don’t think this ad works for an evangelical institution. What does it say about the perspicuity of Scripture, for instance, that the commentaries are in focus and the Bible is clear as mud? “We believe the Bible is God’s word written,” says the ad copy (not pictured above). “It is therefore fully trustworthy... Read more
Joel J. Miller
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