Like most people following the Ravi Zacharias scandal, I knew the full report of his misconduct would be bad when it came. The only question was how bad. Now that it’s dropped, we have the whole ugly picture. Calculated side deals, manipulation, Inception-like layers of deception. A man who publicly preached the vital importance of private virtue, yet ostracized anyone who dared to scratch the facade. For those on the outside of the scandal looking in, the story may not seem… Read more

After last week’s madness, I had some thought of banging out a Take within a few days. That plan went by the wayside as more data came out and more dominoes continued to fall. Now a single week out from January 6th, it feels like we’ve already run through multiple weeks’ worth of news cycles. I, for one, am tired. Literally, physically tired. More than ever, I feel the hyper-accelerated pace of news in the digital age, the exhaustion of… Read more

Like many people in my circles, I’ve been watching with a sinking sadness in recent days as credible revelations about Ravi Zacharias’s sexually predatory behavior continue to mount. Not that I’ve been too shocked. Earlier last year, I sat down with a friend to review the publicly available primary source material related to the Lori Anne Thompson case. At that time, I was already troubled by what seemed like damning marks of credibility in the texture of the documentation, which… Read more

Picture this: Your wife of two decades has just filed for divorce. You’ve battled lifelong clinical depression. Your family is dysfunctional and impossible to talk to. You have no close friends to confide in. You’re on the edge of a crisis. Now, let us suppose, for our purposes, that you are not a churchgoing man. Let’s suppose that you don’t know how to act in church, you don’t know how to talk to church people, and you worry about feeling… Read more

2020 continues not to disappoint, as Liberty University recently announced that Jerry Falwell, Jr. would be taking a “leave of absence” from the school. This announcement came in the wake of a now-famous photo where Falwell was comparing bare bellies with a woman not his wife, fly unzipped. His bizarrely slurred, disjointed radio call-in explanation thereof only made matters worse. Liberty gently took away his mike not long after. For many observers, this is not a shocking development. It was… Read more

Christian media has been abuzz in recent days over a three-way “conversation on race” including Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy, megachurch pastor Louie Giglio, and rapper Lecrae. If this seems like an… odd choice of panelists to throw together for this sort of conversation, you’re not alone in thinking this. But it certainly provided no shortage of fodder for hot takes, so much that it’s taken a couple of waves of reactions to dissect the whole hot mess. The first wave focused on… Read more