Category: Culture War
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...
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...
Rules for Winsomeness
At root, the kerfuffle sparked by James Wood’s summer essay(s) on winsomeness revolves around the question of what makes for an effective Christian witness in America’s current sociocultural moment. For many, this question raises additional issues for how Christians should...
Panic
My friend Rod Dreher recently argued from his blog that we have hit a point in the trans revolution where a moral panic is appropriate, saying:
The Uselessness of “Christian Nationalism”
Over the past several years the topic of Christian nationalism has occupied the minds of Evangelical intellectuals and pastors. No less than half a dozen books have been written on the subject in the past year. Three of them have...
Shame
Shame is, amongst other things, the problem of how to understand yourself and your relationship to neighbor in the aftermath of offending or hurting your neighbor. Given the fragmentation of our society, we shouldn’t be surprised that no one seems...
The Role of Social Science in ‘Deconstructing’ White Evangelicalism
My friend Jonathan Leeman has written a thoughtful reflection on what he calls the project of evangelical deconstruction. I want to respond, in part because I expect some readers may view my forthcoming book, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s...
Purity Culture
So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood.” (Matthew 27:24) Our contemporary culture has...
Dr. Trueman’s Hauerwasian Turn
“My wish is that this book might help Christians rediscover that their most important social task is nothing less than to be a community capable of hearing the story of God we find in the scripture and living in a...
Can Justice Be Saved? Part One: On Faith
Christians can't embrace all aspects of contemporary ideas of social justice. But we must also recognize that what came before was similarly dangerous.