Listen to this piece. Tom Krattenmaker is one of the liberals we evangelicals need to know. In The Evangelicals You Don’t Know: Introducing the Next Generation of Christians, Krattenmaker, one of America’s leading journalists on religion, presents a fair-minded, critical assessment of evangelicalism from his liberal vantage point. Krattenmaker complexifies the situation in which we find ourselves in America today. Drawing attention to a groundswell of compassion and civic virtue within evangelical Christianity that does not fit the negative stereotypes... Read more

Listen to this piece. Holding firmly to biblical truth makes us more relevant as Christians, not less so, as we become more open handed, not closed fisted. My friend, Brian Considine of  the Mission America Coalition (See www.EthnicEmbraceUSA.net), reminded me of this truth when he recently wrote, “As a conservative Biblical Centerist I grow weary of the unthinking nature of what passes for Conservativism in the US today. If we don’t start to line up our political philosophy with Biblical truth... Read more

Listen to this piece. What would you expect from a beat poet? Certainly not someone who stays on the beaten path. One of the ways in which Tony “The Beat Poet” Kriz goes off the beaten path as a Gen-Xer raised in the Evangelical Christian tradition is by finding spiritual value in what those from non-Christian traditions have to say and how they live. He wrote about this recently at Leadership Journal. It also shows in his book, Neighbors and... Read more

Listen to this piece. No idea is bigger than a little life snuffed out. Eight year old Martin Richard was waiting yesterday with his mother and sister for his dad to cross the finish line at the Boston Marathon. Now we are waiting for information as to why someone or some group would set off bombs that would intentionally kill innocent civilians like Martin and seriously harm his mother and sister. No matter the explanation—no matter how big the ideology—the... Read more

Listen to this piece. Evil has many faces. However, we sometimes forget this truth and are taken by surprise. The award-winning show, Breaking Bad, helps us see how complex evil can be. The series is about a high school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with cancer and turns to making crystal meth out of desperation to try and provide a financial safety net for his family long after he is gone. He gets caught in an ever-increasing complex web of... Read more

Listen to this piece. It is off-limits—illegal—in some circles to look at the faces and listen to the personal stories of undocumented workers. Many in these circles fear that if you move it beyond faceless, nameless policies, you will make exception after exception. On this view, the claim is made that you should never base laws on exceptions, so you ignore the exceptions. But the exceptions have faces and names, wives and husbands, children and parents, fears and hopes, just like... Read more

Listen to this piece. Many people respond to questions about undocumented immigrants by saying that they must be deported if the law says so: always obey the law—no questions asked. But what if the law were to be changed to say that all people should be let into our country–no questions asked? Or what about if it were changed to not allow any immigration at all? Hopefully, those who say under the current system that undocumented immigrants must be deported, no... Read more

Listen to this piece. I am grateful to the Christian Post Blog Team for its invitation to me to write a piece calling for Evangelicals to develop a consistent pro-life stance that accounts for gun control. The following entry is my response to their invitation: The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have exhorted Evangelicals to develop a pro-life stance on gun control. They argue that “the growing preponderance of lethal weapons on the streets” is a pro-life issue that deserves... Read more

Listen to this piece. According to the New Testament, whether people are aware of it or not, they are living in Jesus’ matrix. This is how Paul sees things: Jesus is the firstborn of creation (Colossians 1:15) and the firstborn from the dead (Colossians 1:18). He has supremacy over all things, whether people acknowledge his reign or not (Hebrews 2:5-9). As I wrote in the volume Connecting Christ: How to Discuss Jesus in a World of Diverse Paths, All people... Read more

Listen to this piece. Have you ever felt like a whipping boy? Have you ever wanted to get revenge for being treated as a scapegoat and exchange places with the whipping man? My wife and I went to see the play The Whipping Man last Saturday evening. The Whipping Man is a powerful, tragic story of personal faith and shared history involving a severely wounded Jewish Confederate soldier and two of his family’s former slaves. The Jewish Confederate soldier returns... Read more