Spent way too much time last week piling up rocks and too little time posting about all the stuff I’d bookmarked. There are three words in the name of Grace Fellowship Church, but it seems that the pastor and deacons of the Tennessee congregation don’t understand what any of those words mean: “Assault Complaints Filed After Incident at Church.” A gay Gibson County couple said they were assaulted when they tried to attend church services at the Grace Fellowship Church... Read more
I am an evangelical Christian. So are David Barton, Tim LaHaye, Al Mohler and C. Peter Wagner. Apart from our shared faith, there are very few opinions I share with those four men. Nearly all of what they have to say about church and state, pluralism, science, economics and social justice gives me the howling fantods. And yet it remains the case that all five of us are evangelical Christians. I suppose I could just pretend that David Barton, Tim... Read more
Philippians 2:3-8 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.... Read more
This is a terrible idea: the Jesus Ween Project (via). As in turning “Halloween” into “Jesus-ween.” “Ween” is not a suffix, but this is the least of my objections. That’s right, they want Christians to give out Bibles and devotional books instead of candy to trick-or-treaters. Remember being 11 years old and going door to door collecting candy? Now imagine that instead of candy, someone gives you a Bible. Or a copy of Our Daily Bread.* Honestly, don’t these people... Read more
One of my favorite Bible stories is barely a story at all. It’s the story of Shamgar, the parenthetical hero of the book of Judges. Here, in its entirety, is the story of Shamgar: After him came Shamgar son of Anath, who killed six hundred of the Philistines with an ox-goad. He too delivered Israel. That’s Judges 3:31 and that’s it. That’s all we get. One verse with a body count and an unconventional choice of weapon and almost nothing... Read more
I’m not trying to jump the gun on the upcoming Patheos book club on this book, but I wanted to share this anecdote from W. Scott Poole’s fascinating Monsters in America. It’s the story of what happens when someone discovers a mastodon tooth before anyone knew what a mastodon was: In 1705 a farmer discovered a giant tooth near Albany, New York. Puritan divine Cotton Mather, a hunter of witches as well as monsters, wrote a series of letters about... Read more
The Republican Party opposes President Barack Obama’s jobs bill, which Macroeconomic Advisers says will boost America’s GDP and add more than 2 million jobs in the next two years. (See also former McCain campaign economist Mark Zandi — who says the bill would create 1.9 million jobs next year.) But it’s not as though Republicans don’t have any ideas of their own about how to create jobs. Here are three recent Republican jobs proposals, all of which were really offered... Read more
When the Evangelical Environmental Network first launched, the core of our message was simple: If you love the Creator, you ought to care for the creation. I still find the logic of that message compelling and unassailable. If you believe that God made this world, then love of God ought to entail a corresponding love for the world that God made. To be disdainful of creation is to show disdain for the Creator. It’s right there in American evangelical Christianity’s... Read more
My plan for economic recovery is as all-American as the Liberty Bell and as “values-voter” friendly as the Ten Commandments. Here it is: Declare a year of Jubilee — “proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” And no, I’m not kidding. Neither are some economists, as Jennifer Ablan and Matthew Goldstein report for Reuters: More than three years after the financial crisis struck, the economy remains stuck in a consumer debt trap. It’s a situation that... Read more
Tribulation Force, pp. 417-422 Rayford was not sure just when his respect and admiration for Amanda White had developed into love. That word “respect” is unexpected there. It is, I think, the first instance or suggestion so far in this series that a male character might respect a female character. The context that follows in the rest of this chapter undermines the sentence above, but if you take that sentence and separate it from the larger context here, reading it... Read more
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