When people first hear about the doctrine of the bondage of the will, it almost always strikes them as a dark teaching. When I myself was first handed some books on predestination in my youth, I remember seeing the supporting verses and thinking, ‘This looks like it is probably true, and if it is, I […]
There is a distinctly ‘American Religion’ that transcends creeds and denominational labels, crossing the conservative and liberal divide. It is an American version of the Gnostic heresy, as demonstrated by many noted sociologists of religion, and especially Harold Bloom’s The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (Simon & Schuster, 1992). Olympic gold-medalist Bruce […]
‘For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind’ (Hosea 8:7). Hosea’s sad, but ironic, description of the result of Israel’s chronic unfaithfulness to God is hauntingly descriptive of our own day. Unmoored from both nature and Scripture, the human family seems incapable of identifying who they are or why they exist. Social […]
Somewhere in the protracted frenzy of my preparation for the California bar exam, one of my professors gave a piece of indelible essay-writing advice: ‘Be a sheep! Don’t try to stand out. Don’t do things your own way. Stay with the herd.’ He meant, almost counterintuitively, that by avoiding the temptation to express my unique […]
Skandalon is a word dear to the first-semester Greek student’it literally means ‘stumbling block.’ To English speakers, scandal connotes a lewd CNN headline or a story from the next church over. Scandal is engrossing and lets us shake our heads in superior disgust. We would never do anything so icky and dumb. The Greek student, […]
Israel walked into the future facing backward. She spoke of ‘what would be’ in terms of ‘what had been.’ She longed for a resurrection and transfiguration of her past in the days of the Messiah. Her hope was in a new genesis, a second Adam, an eschatological exodus. Thus, when Israel’s prophets spoke of the […]
When you walk into almost any store, you’re immediately overloaded with sights, sounds, smells, and various things to touch. This barrage on your senses is hand-picked for one goal: to make you spend more. Here’s what’s going on. No matter what type of store you walk into’from the Apple store to Wal-Mart’you’ll find all types […]
The question of sexual identity is one of the most hotly debated topics within church and society today, raising important questions about civil rights, social justice, and human identity. Are we defined by our sexual inclinations? Is same-sex preference as intrinsic to our personhood as our gender or ethnicity? How should Christians love their homosexual […]
Introduction to the Conversation The question ‘Who am I?’ is deceptively simple. On the surface, we think we can immediately answer the question, but upon further reflection we discover we actually need a tremendous amount of help to understand our ‘selves.’ We need each other. Not just in order for our communities to function well, […]
A Michigan woman lost her gym membership earlier this year after voicing complaints about the presence of a man in the women’s locker room. The brouhaha ignited over gender’the man used the woman’s locker room because he self-identifies as a woman. Planet Fitness cancelled Yvette Cormier’s membership because she violated the organization’s gender identity nondiscrimination […]
Over the past few years, Esther Meek, a professor of philosophy at Geneva College in Pennsylvania, has joined a great fellowship of intellectuals who have come to challenge the notion that knowledge is prepackaged information that passively exists in an upper realm waiting to be plucked by a mildly inquisitive individual’static, impersonal, cold. Helping to […]
Zack Eswine does for biblical commentary what Red Smith did for sports journalism: he makes it better. Recovering Eden is not a dry, predictable, warmed-over treatment of Ecclesiastes. Rather, it is compelling, challenging, and prophetic. Eswine writes as someone you can tell has wrestled with Ecclesiastes and been changed in the process. In Recovering Eden, […]
