The Consolation of Superheroes: Boethius and Sin in Shazam!
In Shazam!, a wizard who holds captive the demons of the Seven Deadly Sins fails to contain them and recruits in desperation Billy Batson, a wayward miscreant who becomes a hero nearly on par with Superman. Shazam’s name is in fact an acronym, the S standing for the wisdom of Solomon. This incorporation of theological […]
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To A God Unknown: America and the Problem of Public Prayer
Civil religion is thick in America. “God” is on our money, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the Declaration of Independence. We regularly ask him to bless America at ball games, and every session of the U.S. House and Senate opens with a prayer. A few years ago, the question of civil religion became very concrete […]
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The Woke and the Red Pill, Pt III: Interpreting Late Modernity
“I am I and my circumstance,” Ortega was fond of saying. And resisting the cultural forces that threaten to drag our civilization to the death of a fixed tribalism – I previously claimed – requires some reading of our circumstance. This is true for all Christians. Minimally, Christians can be confident that our ultimate enemies […]
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3 Reasons Why Christians Should Think About Modern Art
After 25 years of working in the art world, I remain fascinated by the sheer absurdity and vulnerability of a life devoting to loading a paint brush with smelly, messy pigments and smearing them along a scrap of canvas with the belief and hope that it will become more than the sum of its materials […]
From the Archives
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Can Politics Save?
Can Politics Save? Can politics save? Any professing Christian would answer with an emphatic no! But that’s only if the topic of conversation is the doctrine of salvation. However, when the subject turns to certain hot political issues, often, what sounded like absolute, unconditional doctrine is transformed into a political viewpoint. There seems to be […]
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Grace
As recounted in the recent film, the author of “Amazing Grace,” John Newton, not only knew about grace, but every line of the famous hymn was part of his experience. Born in 1725 to a Protestant mother and a mariner father who had been educated by Spanish Jesuits, John Newton was taught by his mother […]
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Doubt as a Christian Virtue
Agnosticism is, in a sense, what I am preaching. I do not wish to reduce the skeptical element in your minds. I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else. – C. S. Lewis, “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” English professors find […]
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Letter from the Editor
What a year 2020 has proven to be. Such “normal” issues that American evangelicals have had to face over the last half century or so—moral decline attended by the subsequent propagation of naive utopian solutions, increasing political polarity, a diminishing public square, social fragmentation, a deteriorating educational system, rising fear and anxiety—seem to have wildly […]
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Assurance Is Knowledge
(Part Six of a Six-Part Series) We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him. We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the […]
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World Christian Diversity: How Gospel Multiculturalism Can Distinguish, Unite, and Evangelize the World
The summer storm clouds of 2020 overshadowed parts of the United States and the so-called Western world with a tempest of self-recrimination. Ardent believers in a secular ideology of antiracism—guided by a desire for human equality—toppled statues of historic figures, defaced long-established monuments, called for the removal of employees who uttered or Tweeted offensive things, […]
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