Category: Evangelicalism
Deconstructing with Silas Marner
In the early pages of Silas Marner, a devout young weaver falls asleep at a sick man’s bedside and is accused of having robbed the dying man. His religious community resolved on praying and drawing lots… Silas knelt with his...
The PR Style in Christian Media
By now the discourse surrounding Joshua Ryan Butler’s book excerpt published at the Gospel Coalition has in some ways exhausted itself. To be sure, Butler’s intentions for the text—to highlight and commend the beauty of the Christian sex ethic—is fairly...
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...
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...
Deconstruction, Reconstruction and Replacement: Building Near the “Yawning Abyss”
Deconstruction to some degree seems duty free. That individuals subtract parts and pieces of their lives that don’t fit and then figure out what to fill in those abscesses. As we enter into a cultural field of reconstruction (I’m hearing...
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...
Can I Get a Witness?: A Response to Tim Keller
In his recent essay, Tim Keller has entered his bit in a persistent dialogue regarding how Christians should speak in public. The players in this dialogue, including James Wood, Aaron Renn, and Simon Kennedy, are working to sort out how...
How Should Christians Speak in Public?
Watching David Koch skewer evangelical pastor Guy Mason on Australia’s morning show Sunrise was an excruciating experience.[1] Andrew Thorburn had been dismissed for his association with the City on a Hill church just a couple of days after being appointed...
Our Spiritual Malaise
“There are some people [that] tell us that they are tremendously interested in the gospel as a point of view, as a Christian philosophy…Christianity is to them a matter of tremendous interest and they believe and proclaim that if only...