Words for the Anxious Soul
I have been reading (and singing!) through the Psalms a good deal over the past year. One very valuable aspect of the Psalms is the way they give voice to a broad variety of human emotion. This is the inspired...
Reading the Hymns: God Moves In a Mysterious Way
Christmas is almost here, and I once again feel like writing about a hymn. My hymn today is “God Moves in A Mysterious Way”, one of William Cowper’s contributions to the Olney Hymns. It is not, I admit, a very...
Beyond Eclectic Christianity
To say that I come from a mixed background is an understatement. I was raised in the Independent Christian Church movement, discipled in a rising megachurch run by one of the current promoters of Radical Christianity, and have enjoyed close...
The New Pope: Novelty Following Precedent
Yesterday, the Roman Catholic Church got a new Pope: Pope Francis, né Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio. The former archbishop of Buenos Aires was a bit of a surprise pick, as Cardinal Bergoglio was on almost none of the lists of...
Papal Resignations — A Historian’s Take
Pope Benedict caught the whole world off-guard this morning. At the end of the consistory of the College of Cardinals, he announced his resignation as bishop of Rome, effective on the evening of February 28. It was a true surprise...
Is Unwilling Childlessness Necessarily a Call to Adopt?
As an aside in a piece about young couples who decline to have children, Gabriel Fluhrer noted that, “If you are providentially hindered from having children, perhaps the Lord is calling you to adopt children.” This is a fairly conventional...
A Loving Father and Difficult Gifts
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will...
Why Church History? Our Future Contemporaries
Last year, I asked “Why Church History?”, and my answer was to point to the spiritual fellowship that we share across time. We look back, and we see a great crowd all bearing witness to one great Savior. This time,...
But What’s Conservative?
I’ve been following Matt’s recent posts on the culture wars with quiet interest.* He’s already pointed to ambiguities in the term “culture wars”. But in light of his latest post on the culture wars and conservatism, I feel inclined to...
The Skeleton of the Inner Man
I have run in widely varied circles over the past ten or so years. But from the evangelical megachurch to the small missional church plant to the mainline seminary—and everywhere in between—you can run into almost the exact same suspicion...