Category: Evangelicalism
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...
Ecclesial Realignment After the Culture Wars
Last summer, the recently retired minister Ray Ortlund announced that he had been appointed a canon theologian, a teaching office in the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA). That a recently retired minister who held a PhD and had taught...
The Bottoming Out of the American Evangelical Church
The long shadow of 2016 continues to stretch over the church. I recently attended a social event held outdoors. Masking was the most immediately visible demarcation of political lines among a large group of professing Christians; but behind the masks,...
Book Review: Enjoying the Bible by Matthew Mullins
Matthew Mullins. Enjoying the Bible: Literary Approaches to Loving the Scriptures. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021. 224 pp, $22.99. I stood before my class of mostly unengaged private Christian school students in a small Texas town. Masks covered the bottom...
Book Review: Preachers N Sneakers by Ben Kirby
Over the last couple of years, one of the most fun, or infuriating, Instagram accounts to follow has been @PreachersNSneakers. For the uninitiated or the slightly less active on Instagram, PreachersNSneakers is an account that mainly posts pictures of preachers...
Racial Reconciliation and the Queen of the Sciences
In the 2013 book Aliens in the Promised Land, editor Anthony Bradley along with a number of other people of color who have served in predominantly white evangelical institutions explain in great detail why, as the subtitle has it, “minority...
Thin Discipleship
We are experiencing a crisis in American evangelicalism. Responses to issues such as partisan politics, police brutality, or the pandemic demonstrate deep “fault lines” — as one author has recently argued. One explanation argues that these fault lines have developed...
The Six Way Fracturing of Evangelicalism
Written with Skyler Flowers Colin Kaepernick. “Grab them by the p… ” Confederate monuments. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery. COVID – serious problem or overblown? Trump, Biden, other, or abstain? January 6th, 2021. The last few years have highlighted...
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...