Proponents of same-sex marriage haven’t won in the arena of ideas—they have won through manipulation and intimidation. Those who oppose them must speak up. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2014/06/13269/?utm_source=The+Witherspoon+Institute&utm_campaign=1e5b378b96-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_15ce6af37b-1e5b378b96-84107317 Read more

Matthew Schmitz After my Bloggingheads discussion on gay marriage and related matters with Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, a student at a prominent Evangelical college wrote me asking for advice. She said her campus has been riven by the homosexuality debate and she’s found herself challenged to address it in a faithful, thoughtful manner. In lieu of advice, I wrote to her about my own experience as an undergraduate at a time when the campus consensus was all but defined by... Read more

As the Obama team prepared to end the wars of the Bush administration, it felt a need for friends in the Arab world. So the administration bought into the fallacy of “moderate” political Islam. Had they not fallen for the Islamists’ lip service to democracy, they might have paid more attention to the new political force that sparked the Arab Spring: democratic secularism. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/opinion/the-mirage-of-political-islam.html Read more

Book review by Robert Benne The Morally Divided Body: Ethical Disagreement and the Disunity of the Church Pro Ecclesia Series Editors: Michael Root and James J. Buckley Eugene Oregon: Cascade Books, 2012, p. 145. At a recent conference attended by Lutheran theologians and ethicists of three Lutheran churches—ELCA, LCMS, and NALC—a professor from one of the ELCA colleges told me she uses a book or two of mine in her classes even though she disagrees with me on several major... Read more

Egg freezing does not really beat biology. It buys a small chance at giving birth, but at a very high price indeed. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2014/06/13245/?utm_source=The+Witherspoon+Institute&utm_campaign=7e6327e860-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_15ce6af37b-7e6327e860-84107317 Read more

The Pope is ultimately a man of prayer. This might seem obvious, yet it is far from obvious. As head of state and as visitor to a politically charged part of the world, a lot of politics forced itself into what was essentially a pilgrimage of prayer. It is therefore not surprising that the highlights of the trip were the moments of prayer. That is where we got the best of Francis. http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/10-concluding-lessons-from-pope-francis-pilgrimage/ Read more

Bonhoeffer was gay. Well, maybe. Having same-sex desire is very different from what the gay-obsessed culture today calls “gay.” If Bonhoeffer really had this desire, which reviewer Christian Wiman says is clear from the new bio, he certainly was chaste, as the bio makes clear. (more…) Read more

Christian Wiman May 30, 2014 5:30 p.m. ET When I was a kid growing up in the Baptist badlands of far West Texas in the 1980s, the only serious theologian I ever heard a word about was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This was odd in one sense. Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran, and his theology was stringent, complex and fraught with a kind of vital void, a meaning in meaninglessness that Christians were just beginning to piece together from the shards of... Read more

In “My Cross Isn’t Greater Than Yours, or, Enough with the Whining” this anonymous blogger says, “Show me a man who doesn’t suffer, and I’ll show you a dead man. One of the more irksome aspects in the current conversation of LGBT issues and Christianity is the remarkable amount of dreary and droopy writing I hear from folks like me who grew up in the Church and realized they had an attraction to men.” He calls it the “we’re gay... Read more

What language did Jesus speak? Their differences of opinion reflect changes taking place among scholars, but which have yet to make their way fully to mainstream, popular understanding. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century a mistaken notion took hold that has by-and-large continued to dominate both scholarly and popular opinion. http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/bibi-was-right-jesus-spoke-hebrew/ Read more