"This horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity. For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done!" Read more
The faction defending the status quo is -- correctly -- portrayed as the "conservative" side. They're fighting to prevent change. They embody the definition of conservatism by standing athwart history and yelling "Stop!" And thus, because they are in that sense conservative, they also tend to portray themselves and to be portrayed by others as being religiously conservative. Thus positioned as the representatives of religious conservatism, they are therefore also perceived as the defenders of true religion against the liberals and the anti-religious. Everyone else therefore has "a religion problem." Everyone except them. Read more
Cameron "Buck" Williams is the Dirty Harry of journalism, the renegade maverick who plays by his own rules, etc. We've seen little evidence to support this characterization. Ignoring his deadline for the cover story on a global cataclysm might technically count as "bucking" journalistic convention, I suppose, in the same way that his craven willingness to drop his story in order to save his own hide bucks the conventions of "crusading journalist" stories, but I doubt that's what the authors had in mind. Read more
“Your sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother’s house,” the messenger tells Job. “And suddenly a great wind came across the desert, struck the four corners of the house, and it fell on the young people, and they are dead; I alone have escaped to tell you.” When Job learned that his children had died, he wept. But God did not weep. Read more
What had happened was that I'd made it all the way to Numbers. I was doing it -- reading the whole Bible all the way through, start-to-finish, just as we'd been urged and encouraged and admonished to do. And I was reading it devotionally, a little bit every morning, prayerfully and with pen in hand, meditating on its meaning and application to my daily life and my daily walk and God's Plan For My Life. Yet no matter how much I prayed or meditated, there just seemed to be a lot of days when I didn't find anything that seemed terribly profitable for doctrine, or for reproof, or for correction, or for instruction in righteousness. Read more
The start of a new year brings us a wide variety of read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year plans. Some of these are more sophisticated than others, but ultimately all such checklist approaches boil down to basic arithmetic. Our Bibles have been conveniently chopped into 31,102 verses, divided by 365 days in a year. So then it's just a matter of slicing it into little 85.2-verse chunks for daily consumption. This is a very strange, unhelpful way to read a book. Read more
This is how news works. It is inescapably "biased" in that it is presented and received as either Good News or Bad News. And most of the time, no one complains about the bias implicit in all such judgments because everyone agrees. What kind of sicko wouldn't agree that a family losing their home is Bad News? And who could be so demented as to not understand that the family surviving the fire is Good News? Read more
So all of the taking-separate-cabs and switching-press-ID tricks that Buck and Steve employ in this little set piece fail to impress. It's hard to be impressed when all those tricks are in the service of our so-called hero trying to negotiate the terms of his surrender with the bad guys. Read more
"How can we know the way?" Thomas asks. "Read the Bible," says the evangelical preacher down the block from me. "Read the Bible as absolutely true and authoritative, in every word," says Tim Keller. But that's not what Jesus said. Not at all. Read more
My wife's arm is now in the high-tech cast she'll wear for the next several weeks as the tendons in her arm heal. That's possible because of your generosity, so thank you again. And again and again. Read more
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