Have you been following the Chick-fil-A controversy? The mayors of Chicago and Boston want to ban it from their cities because of the stance the CFA head has taken on traditional marriage? Denny Burk has some good thoughts on this strange and discomfiting fracas: I am not nearly as concerned with public boycotts of Chick-fil-a as I am with the potential abuse of government power by the mayors of Chicago and Boston. I’m glad to see that the editors of... Read more
Howard Bryant of ESPN calls out American sports culture in the context of the recent Penn State football sanctions: Penn State lost its fun and games, its diversion. It lost a fictionalized version of itself and its fallen, iconic coach. It lost numbers in a record book and money from its wallet. The sanctions against the football program were, in effect, significant only through one insular, unimportant lens: the overemphasis on football and big-time sports in general that created an... Read more
A great piece of careful reporting from Baptist Press: WASHINGTON (BP) — There’s good news and bad news for Planned Parenthood. The good news is the Obama administration continues to go out of its way to funnel money to the country’s No. 1 abortion provider. The bad news is Planned Parenthood can’t stop scandals and negative reports from reaching at least some of the American public. For instance: — A 24-year-old woman died July 20 after undergoing an abortion at... Read more
My friend Jared Compton, finishing a PhD on Hebrews under D. A. Carson at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, just published a thoughtful and constructive blog on Theologically Driven, the excellent faculty blog of Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary. Jared wrote about biblical womanhood, riffing off the recent Atlantic essay by Anne-Marie Slaughter that explored why modern women still, after so many years of seeming advance, have so much trouble “having it all.” Here’s a snatch: [U]se Slaughter’s piece to remind and encourage the... Read more
There’s been a lot of talk about evangelicals opting out of the culture wars recently. Some of that could be good. Few of us want to identify the church with the Republican Party, or to act as if anything is more needful than the promotion of the gospel. But some of this discussion, led by folks like Jonathan Merritt and Rachel Held Evans, is deeply harmful. Why those strong words? Because there is a desperate need for the church to... Read more
Raymond Johnson, a PhD student at Southern Seminary, just published a very helpful essay on tipping and the gospel at Baptist Press, the official media outlet of the Southern Baptist Convention. It’s worth reading and considering. Here’s a snatch: Whether Christians are aware of it or not, a subpar tip is a stumbling block in communicating the Gospel. It causes unbelieving servers to think that we, as Christians, value money over everything and everyone else (1 Timothy 6:10). So, my... Read more
Nope. At least not if you consider their amazing missions output in these decades. This is my summary from Joel Carpenter’s marvelous Revive Us Again (Oxford, 1999), pages 28-29: Modernism wrought devastating effects in the Northern Baptist Convention. It sent 845 staffers overseas in 1930; it sent 508 in 1940. From 1920 to 1936 the Northern Baptist budget for missions plummeted 45%. In 1936, no new missionaries were sent out from the Northern Baptists. In this same time, fundamentalists sent... Read more
One of three favorite sermons of Jonathan Edwards is “The Excellency of Christ.” If you have not read the sermon, print it out and read it over the course of two weeks in your devotional time or your lunch hour. You won’t be the same afterwards. Jonathan Edwards was brilliant, but he was primarily a preacher, and an exquisite one at that. Here’s a snatch to consider. This is preaching at its best–soaring, richly biblical, bringing you face to face... Read more
Scott Klusendorf recently taught an ethics course at Biola University. It included the above lecture. You can find the whole sequence of lectures on ethics here. Klusendorf is clear, convictional, and speaking words we need to hear. Check out his books here. Read more
Carl F. H. Henry: “Human knowledge as human activity has its ultimate ground in God. Such knowledge involves at once a knowledge of God, of the universe, and of human selves. Since man is by creation a psychosomatic entity, his knowledge involves intuition, religious faith, psycho-introspection and -extrospection, as well as sense perception. But what makes human knowledge ultimately possible is God’s revelation of himself and of the universe he orders and in and through which he also make himself... Read more
Thought Life
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In