Can You Serve on the School Board if you Already Go Out to Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting?

Last updated on: May 5, 2015 at 3:54 pm By D. G. Hart

In his book, Bad Religion, Ross Douthat covers the resistance that “orthodox” Christians (Roman Catholics and evangelicals) provided to the secularization of American society. The convergence of “Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” according to Douthat, forged a “political and cultural agenda, which would seek ‘the legal protection of the unborn’ and defend the connection between ‘marriage, parenthood, and family’ while resisting euthanasia, eugenics, pornography, and other perceived threats to the American moral fabric.” But the alliance would not amount to much.... Read more

The Upside of Keeping Religion Private

Last updated on: May 1, 2015 at 4:27 pm By D. G. Hart

It looks like Ben Carson might need some help from John F. Kennedy. Southern Baptists have canceled an invitation to the surgeon and would-be presidential candidate to a pastors’ conference over discrepancies between his statements and Baptist convictions. Carson’s membership as a Seventh-Day Adventist is not the source of the problem, though it might well have been 100 years ago before many Protestants reclassified the Adventists as evangelical rather than a cult. The problem is that he has referred, according... Read more

Scandal, Division, and Glass Houses

Last updated on: April 28, 2015 at 4:26 pm By D. G. Hart

I don’t like taking issue with a fellow historian and Patheos blogger, but I wonder if Thomas Howard may want to tone down his pitch for ecumenism just a tad. He writes about the recent visis of Boston Archbishop Cardinal O’Malley to Gordon College and concludes with this: Let me close with a challenge for leaders at evangelical/Protestant colleges and evangelical/Protestant churches who might happen upon this post: figure out what Catholic diocese you are in, and then invite the... Read more

Isn’t the Gospel of Matthew in the Douay Bible?

Last updated on: April 24, 2015 at 3:55 pm By D. G. Hart

Mark Shea tries to show the superiority of Roman Catholics to Protestants by arguing that Protestant opposition to divorce relies not on Scripture alone but also on tradition: One basic rule of thumb to understand in Catholic/Protestant conversations is that it is not the case that Catholics rely on Sacred Tradition and Protestants don’t. Rather, Catholics (and, by this, I mean “educated Catholics speaking out of the Magisterial teaching of the Church”) rely on Sacred Tradition and know they do,... Read more

Should Evangelical Protestants Shift Their Rooting Interests to the Philadelphia Eagles?

Last updated on: April 22, 2015 at 4:59 pm By D. G. Hart

The reason for asking is that the NFL franchise in the City of Brotherly Love has just signed Tim Tebow, the uber pious Heisman Trophy winning quarterback, to a contract. When an athlete has particular religious affiliations, believers tend to get a bit giddy, maybe even to the point of losing perspective. Consider the piece that the folks at Crux ran about Jordan Spieth, the champion at this year’s Masters golf tournament. Though only a graduate of a Roman Catholic... Read more

Suburbanites All

Last updated on: April 20, 2015 at 3:58 pm By D. G. Hart

Megachurches have their problems and I am certainly not a fan. But I wonder if academics who critique these kinds of congregations have ever looked in the mirror. For instance, in the following quotation, notice that what the writer argues could equally be applied to colleges and universities in the United States: many of today’s evangelicals professors strive to reconcile their suburban lifestyle with their Christian walk professional status. There is a heavy emphasis in modern Christian academic literature on... Read more

I Woke Up Today and Discovered I Live in a Gulag

Last updated on: April 9, 2015 at 4:51 pm By D. G. Hart

Sorry folks but the recurring refrain that Christians in the United States are experiencing persecution simply because some people object to Indiana’s RFRA law is getting old and sounding hysterical. Rachel Lu puts it this way: By contrast, the Judeo-Christian tradition calls for subsidiarity and a respect for natural community and natural rights. It also advises restraint, born of the realization that political community will always be imperfect in a fallen world. These two impulses do not mesh harmoniously. The... Read more

How Non-Christians Hear Christians

Last updated on: April 8, 2015 at 5:08 pm By D. G. Hart

With all the hoopla about religious freedom and the persecution of Christians, a post by Tim Challies about the dangers of separating the sacred and the secular caught my eye. In this piece, Challies quotes Nancy Pearcey, the worldview proponent extraordinaire, on why Christians so often talk past non-Christians: Listen to what Pearcey says: “This same division also explains why Christians have such difficulty communicating in the public arena. It’s crucial for us to realize that nonbelievers are constantly filtering... Read more

A Psalm for Frank Sinatra and Mitzi Gaynor?

Last updated on: April 3, 2015 at 12:01 pm By D. G. Hart

The Joker’s Wild is an incredibly good movie, maybe the best Frank Sinatra film I’ve seen. Not only does Frank sing, but he plays a singer whose vocal chords are damaged and returns to the stage as a stand-up comic. Sinatra has great timing. And, dare I say, this was the first movie in which I had seen Mitzi Gaynor star. She plays one of the dancers that opens for Sinatra’s comic routine. Talk about energy. (And by the way,... Read more

Not Only Hymns, but Psalms

Last updated on: March 30, 2015 at 4:04 pm By D. G. Hart

Our good editor here encouraged posts about “what good is religion, anyway.” In my neck of the Protestants woods, Presbyterians (Orthodox Presbyterian Church) are breaking bread with Reformed Protestants (United Reformed Churches) to produce a Psalter-Hymnal that both communions can use for corporate and private worship. This is either remarkably historic or unbelievably kooky. The historic significance may be for one wing of American Presbyterians (the OPC) to return to a complete Psalter for public worship. Ever since the First... Read more