I remember April 29, 1992 very vividly. I was a second-year student at Fuller Theological Seminary. During a break in a two-hour course, I descended from the third floor of Peyton Hall to check my student mailbox on the ground floor. There, the mail guy was listening to the radio. He told me that the cops who beat Rodney King had been acquitted, and he told me to go somewhere safe. It was about 3:30pm. I took his advice and... Read more
Who says Flash is dead? HT: Doug Pagitt Read more
According to misogynistic pastors like Russell Moore and John Piper, “complementarians” just aren’t pushing women down enough. LOUISVILLE, Ky. (ABP) – A movement in evangelical Christianity that promotes male headship and wifely submission in marriage faces competition today not from radical feminists but rather believers who are “complementarian” in name only, according to a panel at a recent pastor’s conference. “What I fear is that we have many people in evangelicalism who can check off ‘complementarian’ on a box but... Read more
This post is part of the Patheos Book Club. Check out the Book Club for more posts on this book and for responses from other bloggers and columnists. And be sure to join the live chat with the author, 2-3pm EDT TODAY. Some of us giggled a bit when, a few years back, the notoriously liberal United Church of Christ denomination inaugurated a marketing campaign with the tagline, “God Is Still Speaking.” What they were getting at is that God’s interest in... Read more
No, seriously, that’s the name of the group: Angry Queers. They threw baseball-sized rocks through windows (in case you don’t know how big a baseball is, the reporter holds one up to show you). Among the windows broken were century-old stained glass. PORTLAND, OR (KPTV) – Vandals smashed nine windows with rocks at Mars Hill Church in southeast Portland overnight and a group claimed responsibility in an email sent to FOX 12. Neighbors of the church called 911 at 3:20... Read more
I’ve heard it for years: “The emerging church is nothing more than the Jesus Movement warmed over.” Well, I don’t really think so, but who am I to say? Roger Olson is, as he states, one of the few persons who is qualified to really speak to the parallels, making this a must-read: It’s dangerous to generalize about either the JPM or the ECM. Neither had/has a headquarters or unifying organization. Both were/are grassroots movements that seemed to spring up... Read more
Earlier this week, I wrote about Chuck Colson. Colson, in his 2006 attack on the emergent church movement, wrote negatively about literary critic and commentator Stanley Fish, saying, The arguments of some emerging church leaders, I fear, draw us perilously close to the trap set by postmodern deconstructionist Stanley Fish. Defending himself after his sympathetic statements about the 9/11 terrorists boomeranged, Fish claimed that postmodernists don’t really deny the existence of truth. He said there is simply no “independent standard... Read more
I’ve had several conversations recently with friends and acquaintances about what religion is, and I’ve read a couple book manuscripts about it. Those who are pro-religion tend to refer to religion as a root system. It’s like the bulb of a plant, and from that bulb grows our spirituality. Without roots, our faith is unhinged from anything. We become spiritual-but-not-religious, New Age syncretists. But this isn’t religion. I think, instead, that God is the bulb, the roots. It is from God that... Read more
This post is part of the Patheos Book Club. Check out the Book Club for more posts on this book, an interview with the editor, and for responses from other bloggers and columnists. As I am wont to do, I’ll begin with my quibbles. These aren’t letters to a future church, as the book’s title promises. They are letters to the church today. Actually, I’d be very intrigued by a book of letters to the church 100 or 1,000 years... Read more
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