Category: Theology and Practice
Evangelization After the Secular Sabbath
For Christians of a certain age, I expect a certain kind of Christian testimony will sound familiar: You grow up in a home with both of your biological parents (who are married), you grow up in and around the church,...
The Masculinity Crisis is an Economic Crisis
The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill has led to much reflection on the state of the modern evangelical soul. One thing that stood out from the podcast is that Driscoll and many like him have capitalized on the perception...
Aardvarks and Alphabets
Just 35 miles from my home in northeast Cambodia, there lives an indigenous minority called the Kachok. There are about four thousand Kachok in nine different villages. While they are ethnically related to other tribes in our region, as well...
The Blind Get the Last Laugh
“Did you play with other kids at the park today?” I ask my kids over lunch. “Yeah, we made a friend,” my son says, while my daughter chirps, “with a baby!” She is barely bigger than a baby herself. “But,”...
Winsomeness, Evangelism, and Pastoral Theology
It is an odd thing to see a pastor from New York City presented as the spokesman for a movement supposedly defined by its concern with “winsomeness.” Though I do not know the city that well, my few trips to it have...
Calvinism and Liberty
If you had to summarize Calvin’s teaching on resisting tyrants it would be: don’t. Even as his Protestant compatriots, the Huguenots, faced persecution and he fled France to Geneva, Calvin was firmly on the side of maintaining political order. He...
Learning to See with Norman Wirzba
Soon after we moved to Australia, my family hiked in a temperate rainforest in the Yarra Ranges, an hour-and-a-half from our house. Southern Victoria is home to several of these rainforests. They challenge my prior knowledge of rainforests as places...
Imperial Migrations
The question I dislike the most is, “Where are you from?” My Eastern-European accent usually gives away the fact that I am not, should I say, local. Now that I live on the East Coast, I am often tempted to...
When Belief is Agony
I love being a Christian. I mean, I love Jesus too. But I also love all the rest of it: Brunch after church with friends, hylomorphism, late-night Eucharist on Christmas Eve, and carols and stollen and roast beef and friends’...
Friendship Through a Pandemic: Seeing More Clearly With Stanley Hauerwas
Ephraim Radner and others have recently reflected that the church’s theologians have said shockingly little about the pandemic that’s really been helpful, that’s helped Christians think clearly about this global crisis. To get our heads straight, minds clear, and hearts...