David French is an evangelical Iraq War veteran and Harvard Law School graduate who has fought for religious freedom.  In the last few years he has attacked pro-Trump evangelicals.  More recently he has gone after those on the right who reject Critical Race Theory (CRT) as unchristian and unworthy of classroom study.  His most current charge is that by dismissing CRT, Christians betray  “fundamentalist” ways of thinking, neglect a helpful tool for exposing systemic racism in America, and deprive students... Read more

Throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern period, and even today in some areas of the world, Jews have dreaded Holy Week.  They remember the many occasions when Christians have poured out of churches after Good Friday services and attacked Jewish people and their homes and synagogues. Why have Christians done these horrible things?  Of course, there has always been residual anti-semitism.  But Good Friday readings became triggers that convinced Christians on that holy day that Jews were—and are!—Christ-killers. ... Read more

from Christopher Benson at Christianity Today As I read The Future of Orthodox Anglicanism, an engaging collection of essays edited by Anglican priest and theologian Gerald McDermott, I realized that my Anglican family—the third-largest Christian communion in the world (85 million) behind Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy—bears resemblance to the Karamazov family in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. for the rest of this article, click here. Read more

[Friends, this post came out in an altered form at World magazine last week.  It was toned down in a way that suggested we might indeed face a climate catastrophe, which is the opposite of what I wrote.  Thus this original version.] Pope Francis warns that we face a global “climate emergency.”  In his opening address to students in September,  the president of Harvard University said climate change is “the most consequential threat facing humanity.” Climate catastrophists like Francis and Harvard’s president... Read more

Parents from Biden-voting areas such as Westchester County (NY), Maricopa County (AZ), and northern Virginia have been protesting the teaching of critical race theory in their public schools. They object that it divides students by race and intimates that skin color denotes either guilt or innocence. Christian parents often assume that evangelical institutions are free from such secular ideologies. But recent developments at three leading evangelical schools suggest they need to look more carefully. Click here for the rest of this article. Read more

Are we as brave as we think we are? Many Christians wonder what they would have done if they had lived in earlier periods of moral horror. Would they have spoken out against slavery in America’s antebellum period? Would they have denounced what Germany was doing to Jews in the 1930s? The time for speculation is over. Today, there is a similar horror that demands a response. China has set up what might be the most extensive system of concentration... Read more

Friends, Alan Rubenstein is a new friend of mine.  He was the chair of an international Jewish-evangelical dialogue I joined earlier this year.  Alan lives in Northfield, Minnesota.  This is the fascinating story of how he tried to mediate conflict among his neighbors over Israel and Palestine by showing them a new movie about the conflict and inviting them to his home for discussion.  Forty neighbors showed up. (more…) Read more

[Friends, please excuse the out-of-whack formatting in places.  The program did not always cooperate.] Martin Kuldorff, prof. of medicine at Harvard Medical School, specialist in viruses https://www.theepochtimes.com/harvard-epidemiologist-martin-kulldorff-on-vaccine-passports-the-delta-variant-and-the-covid-public-health-fiasco_3942556.html There is a thousand-fold difference in risk between the oldest and youngest who contract Covid-19. Children are at “miniscule” risk. Of 1.8 million children in Sweden, where there were no lockdowns and kids attended school throughout the pandemic, there were no deaths. Young adults have very little risk. Lockdowns are against all the... Read more

Several years ago I sent a manuscript on race to an evangelical book publisher. I was surprised to read the editor’s response that this book would not advance racial reconciliation—despite the book’s containing a majority of chapters by black thinkers. I quickly learned that for some evangelicals, certain black voices are not worth listening to. Among those voices is that of Voddie Baucham, a pastor in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) who now serves as dean of a seminary in... Read more

My title might be dismissed as histrionic.  But there is a country today that imprisons, tortures, and kills people not only because of their so-called race but also for their religion.  It is communist China. Not only Muslims (Uyghurs and Kazakhs, and these supposedly because their tribes contain “extremists”) but Christians also. Is it anything near the scale of what Hitler did? Well, you be the judge: 1200 concentration camps and 3 million imprisoned there.  Young people enter and never... Read more