Month: February 2023
Renewing Public Protestantism: Online Media
(this post could be understood as a companion piece to the recent statement regarding a renewal of public Protestantism) If our traffic data is accurate, most of you reading this right now are reading on your phone. Over the last...
Championing an Unknown and Unbeloved Era: A Survey of Heiko A. Oberman’s Life, Work, and Methodology
The Late Middle and Reformation historian, Heiko A. Oberman, has left an indelible impact upon Renaissance and Reformation studies even twenty years after his untimely death. In this article, I seek to give an account of Oberman’s life and legacy,...
Deconversion and the Cross
What has God promised us about our lives, in the here and now? One of the earliest works of Christian theology is Origen of Alexandria’s On First Principles; a case can be made that it is our oldest, extant text...
Descent
At the beginning of The Divine Comedy, in Canto I of Inferno, Dante opens with these famous lines:
No Dust on Me
The third season of His Dark Materials, the television adaptation of British fantasy writer Philip Pullman’s popular trilogy, wrapped up this winter. While the show, airing on the BBC in the UK and on HBO internationally, was looked to as...
Rules for (Theological) Retrieval
I’ve always been intrigued by archaeology. The expectant digging, the gentle sweeping away of silt and debris, unearthing bones and artifacts hidden for millennia; it’s all endlessly fascinating. A thing lost and long forgotten to humankind suddenly reappears enclosed in...
Toward a Renewed Public Protestantism: The Beginnings of a Manifesto
In his book Bad Religion, Ross Douthat suggests that the 1950s were the high water mark for Christianity in America. Amongst other things, church attendance was at its peak and each of America’s four defining ecclesial traditions were relatively strong....
The Case for Pew Bibles
Do pew Bibles matter? Churches of all styles have had to ask this question in recent years. The increase of church plants using secular spaces for worship means that church planters must contemplate the extra weight, hassle, and expense of...
Epiphany: How an Enchanted World Drew Outsiders to God
A number of years ago, a wise parent shared with me an insight for which I have been repeatedly grateful: One reason God gives us children is so that we adults can [re]discover nature. This has proven true on numerous...
Niebuhr and Carson, Reconsidered
With the apparent imminent demise of American Christendom, the reaction among evangelicals has covered the gamut: from fight to flight to freeze to fawn. The panic might have increased, but the range hasn’t changed much. Over a decade ago, in...