Ethics and Toxic Masculinity In recent months there has been a renewed interest in and use of the concept “toxic masculinity”—largely due to this recent spate of male sexual predators who are celebrities. And the #MeToo Movement (which I fully support). So what is meant by “toxic masculinity?” There are many definitions and descriptions of it. But they all seem to have one thing in common—that many boys and men are socially conditioned to repress feelings of sorrow and empathy... Read more

Should Boys and Girls Wrestle Each Other? A Case Study in Sex and Cultural Gender Confusion For those of you who have not read about the case I will summarize it briefly without naming names or offering information that might identify the participants. (I don’t want to add to their grief over the publicity to which they have already been subjected by the press.) The case: A high school boy who is a member of a wrestling team is required... Read more

Is There “No Possibility” That God Exists? Thoughts about Stephen Hawking’s Final Declaration In his last book Brief Answers to Big Questions (Bantam, 2018) physicist Stephen Hawking argued that not only is there no proof of God’s existence but that “there’s no possibility of God.” (See “Stephen Hawking’s Final Book Says There’s ‘No Possibility’ of God in Our Universe” at “Live Science” at https://www.livescience.com/63854-stephen-hawking-says-no-god.html . According to this article, to his dying day Hawking believed science has disproven God’s existence.... Read more

Our God Reigns (But How?) (A Sermon) One of our favorite truths is that “our God reigns.” The Bible clearly tells us and our experience confirms—that God is the ruler over all. I whole heartedly affirm that great truth—but with one reservation, qualification. It has to do with another biblical theme: that God has adversaries. What I mean is that, according to the biblical witness God does not always yet get his way in everything. The Bible confronts us with two... Read more

Follow Up to Spiritual Warfare Essay: What about True Multiculturalism? Two brief explanations: First, for most of my thirty-seven years teaching career in American Christian higher education I have heard much about the need for multiculturalism, cultural engagement, diversity, and acceptance of non-western ways of life. A great deal of pressure is exerted on faculty members of institutions of higher education, both religious and secular, to draw on “two thirds world” cultures (as well as women’s experience and African-American and... Read more

Have American Christians Simply Given Up the Biblical Theme of Spiritual Warfare? First, to ward off expected critical responses, let me just say that this subject is fraught with pitfalls. During the 1970s, for example, American evangelical Christianity was shaken by various “deliverance ministries” that went to extremes with exorcisms and methods of “spiritual warfare” that were unbiblical and even superstitious. It is my thesis that the popularity and fallout of this extreme movement led (again) to throwing the baby... Read more

Why Sexual Abuse within Baptist Churches Is Not the Same… Recently a major U.S. city daily newspaper has run a series of articles about sexual abuse by clergy and other church professionals especially in the Southern Baptist Convention. Victims and victims’ rights groups have demanded that the SBC do more to prevent sexual abuse within its ranks and to punish (by banishing) the predators. It’s clear to me that there exists some confusion about Baptist polity (church government); I suspect... Read more

The Dark Side of Evangelicalism Here, in this essay, by “evangelicalism” I do not mean any particular evangelical movement but what I have described as the “evangelical ethos”—a broad and inclusive spiritual-theological form of Christianity defined by the so-called “Bebbington quadrilateral”: conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism. I have expounded these here much in the past, so I will refrain from doing so again. Anyone interested can simply look up the “Bebbington quadrilateral” and read about evangelical Christianity—not as a particular... Read more

Evangelicalism Again: Why Are They Not Using My Distinction between “Movement” and “Ethos?” This is my response to the following Religion News article: https://religionnews.com/2019/02/06/there-are-no-real-evangelicals-only-imagined-ones/ I read it with real interest and was very disappointed. The subject is one I have discussed here and in some of my articles, book chapters, and books frequently. I expended great energy in trying to enlighten people about the difference between “evangelical movements” (which come and go) and the “evangelical ethos” which is world-wide and... Read more

What Has Happened to the Evangelical Christianity of Not Long Ago? The other day I was having a conversation with a man about my age who entered the Christian ministry as a very young man—while still in college. My father did the same. He began pastoring a church at age 19! I grew up in a church world where young men (and women) were expected to hear a “call from God” to some kind of vocation of service while they... Read more