Month: November 2022
Tolkien Was Right: Notes on the Respect for Marriage Act and the Post-Boomer Church
Some time after his death, an editor was going through the papers and books in J. R. R. Tolkien’s library when he came across an old copy of C. S. Lewis’s pamphlet “Christian Behavior,” which would later be re-published as...
Pursue Obscurity
Craig Bartholomew, who has been a friend and mentor to many of us younger Christian scholars, often repeats the admonition: “pursue obscurity.” It is not enough simply to accept obscurity, if it happens to be our lot. Rather, there is...
The Hollowness of the Mainline, Now and Then
Douglas J. Brouwer Chasing After Wind: A Pastor’s Life. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022. 238 pp. $22.00 It’s no secret that Western Christianity is in decline. And this is nowhere more evident than in the once venerable churches of the mainline....
The Withering of Persuasion
What are any of us doing when we take up our avatars and handles to enter into fights on Facebook and Twitter? When we post links and frame them with incendiary remarks as though sharing the link was itself a...
Book Interview: The Thrill of Orthodoxy: Rediscovering the Adventure of Christian Faith by Trevin Wax
Trevin Wax is vice president of research and resource development at the North American Mission Board. He is also a visiting professor at Cedarville University. The following interview revolves around his recently released book, The Thrill of Orthodoxy. The Thrill...
Small and Afraid and Without Knowledge
On May 11, 1997, a computer program won a chess match against a world champion for the first time in history. The defeated Garry Kasparov said that after Game 5, “he had become so dispirited that he felt the match...
Esther and the Theology of Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is our most Christian holiday. Just ask the Puritans. They did not give us Thanksgiving as an annual holiday after a great feast to celebrate a year of survival in America and then say, “This was fun, let’s do...
How (Not) to Watch the Beautiful Game
Growing up Monday mornings were either a delight or a dread depending on which football — what a minority of the world calls soccer — team you supported. If your team had lost over the weekend, you were in for...
Rich Christians in an Age of Competing Obligations
Christianity is a religion of seemingly impossible paradoxes, and the Christian life is a series of decisions made within a set of difficult, often excruciating tensions. The simplest paradoxes are the purely theological ones: Jesus is fully God and man;...
Kites
I taught my sons to fly a kite the other day. It was a beautiful Sunday morning and the wind was just right for it. They are old enough to know how a kite should fly but not old enough...