The accounts of creation seemed, for them, to have nothing to say about divine intent or divine affection, but only about divine technique. The story of Noah seemed to be nothing more than a complicated word problem involving the measuring of livestock capacity in cubits. Read more
Fred Kaplan says Republican senators can no longer be trusted on national security; Margot Starbuck says Christians should rejoice with those who rejoice; the blogger formerly known as the Real Live Preacher tells us about "A Thing That Happened;" Dianna Anderson says sexual ethics must start with consent; and Ed Kilgore muses on Protestants who reach Catholic conclusions while rejecting Catholic reasoning. Read more
This week we had a large meteor ripping across the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia, which is just exactly the sort of spectacular event that gets people talking about the End of the World. But then people don't really need anything so spectacular to get them talking about the End of the World -- a topic that seems to obsess millions of people even on days when giant rocks aren't disintegrating in our atmosphere. Read more
Zephaniah 3:14-20: "I will deal with all your oppressors at that time. And I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth." Read more
Mary Bird rejects the explicit biblical texts condoning slavery, saying, "I can read my Bible; and there I see that I must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate; and that Bible I mean to follow." Clearly she's been reading too much Rob Bell or something and she's no longer a real, true evangelical Christian. Read more
I never pay much attention to the perennial discussion of how to "define" evangelical or evangelicalism. That discussion doesn't matter. There is no definition. There is no rulebook, only umpires. Lots of umpires. There's an ever-changing cast of out-of-shape guys in black pants running out onto the field, calling balls and strikes and expelling players, managers, coaches and other umpires. Read more
These are delusions because Missouri does, in fact, exist, and because its existence is not conditional upon your "belief" in the reality or unreality of that fact. Read more
Nicolae Carpathia is stuck with a prophecy check list that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, so it would be unfair to blame him for pursuing the various quirky and irrational goals required by this assigned agenda. But even if we give him the benefit of the doubt on that score, when we hear Nicolae describe his grand schemes, I think we're hearing an Antichrist who's in over his head. He simply hasn't done his homework. Read more
No amount of rhetoric on behalf of freedom and democracy could compete with the message such an outpost would provide. Our ordinary rendition of democracy and freedom is powerful, but this model, this extraordinary rendition, would be even more powerful. Read more
It's the Friday music game -- I'll show you mine and you show me yours. This week it's another alphabetical slice of songs named for famous people, letters P through R, for which I've got songs named after four musicians, a president, a first lady, an actress, a doctor and a jockey. Read more
Select your answer to see how you score.
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