It was several years ago — a hot summer evening in July — when the receptionist buzzed my office phone for the umpteenth time that day. “Why me?” I thought to myself. I was on a deadline. I had to prepare my sermon for the evening service. “Yes?” I inquired after the third ring. “There is a young woman here to see you.” “I don’t have any appointments scheduled this evening.” “No — she really needs to see you.” She... Read more

Shortly after the 2004 publication of his book, Random Designer, biologist Richard Colling was prohibited from teaching introductory biology courses at Olivet Nazarene College in Illinois and his book was banned from the campus. Peter Enns, who earned his PhD from Harvard University in Near Eastern languages and civilizations, claimed that the first chapters of Genesis are firmly grounded in ancient myth, which he defines as “an ancient, premodern, prescientific way of addressing questions of ultimate origins in the form of stories”; in 2008,... Read more

There is a fairly well-know idiom, “give someone an inch and they’ll take a mile” that describes a person or group who has been given a small amount of power or freedom to do something, and then attempts to seize a lot more, or unlimited, power. That sense of entitlement is often the result of giving preferential treatment to a person or group over and above that of everyone else, and it is likely why the Founding Fathers did not... Read more

by Andre E. JohnsonR3 Editor *Read part 1 here.  Read Part 2 here Get your copy of the Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition American Prophetic Tradition in paperback today.  With the frustration at the politics surrounding the Civil Rights Bill debate and the continued racism aimed at African Americans, Turner turned his attention to Africa. While Turner eventually became a staunch supporter and defender of African emigration, during this time in his life, he only just began to mention Africa in... Read more

In her essay titled “Oppression,” Marilyn Frye speaks of the perpetual confinement of oppressed groups. She writes, “One of the most characteristic and ubiquitous features of the world as experienced by oppressed people is the double bind –situations in which options are reduced to a very few and all of them expose one to penalty, censure or deprivation” (Frye, 150). Colloquially, the double bind forces the socially underprivileged individual to “never win.” Race relations provide a perfect arena for the... Read more

Jonathan Edwards was a slave-owner. That can be surprising because we tend to think of slavery as a strictly Southern calamity. Edwards was a New Englander who later became president of the college in Princeton and we Americans often prefer to forget that American slavery was once common in places like Massachusetts and New Jersey. Edwards was a clergyman and an intellectual, so unlike George Whitefield — another prominent figure in the Great Awakening — he was never involved in... Read more

In the United States, the debate between science and religion seems to be powered by a perpetual motion machine. The claims that Neil deGrasse Tyson’s inspired Cosmos series was anti-religious stands as the latest salvo in a long battle that generates lots heat but very little light. Having been in many of these debates, both formally and informally, I’m often struck by how narrow the discussion remains. That’s because often people don’t want to talk about science and religion; they... Read more

America has long been the incubator of many spiritual creeds going back to the Great Awakening and even earlier. Only one of them, Mormonism, has taken root and flourished as a true religion sprung from our own native ground. Today, however, we have a new faith growing from this nation’s soil: the Tea Party. Despite its secular trappings and “taxed enough already” motto, it is a religious movement, one grounded in the traditions of American spiritual revival. This religiosity explains... Read more

Sitting at a coffee shop, I overheard a conversation between a man and a woman discussing the problem of suicide. The man suggested that God punishes those who commit suicide, and the woman completely disagreed. “Read the bible,” the man said. “God punishes people in the bible all the time.” “I don’t care what the bible says,” the woman retorted. “God cares and loves us. He knows that we have struggles, and he is here to take care of us.”... Read more

Amy Tincher is an evangelical Christian who plays bass in the band at her suburban Ohio church, where she and her fellow congregants firmly believe the “words we adhere to” are those in the Bible. But last summer, without telling her husband and two kids exactly what she was doing, she boarded a plane for a conference in Kansas whose purpose many evangelicals would plainly consider heretical. Tincher was one of 50 people flown from around the country and the... Read more