Online worship. Zoom church. Streaming services on Facebook Live (if you can get it to actually work). We’re all used to this strange new world by now. But it can get stranger: how about entirely virtual churches in the Metaverse?[1] This latest development should remind us that even though we’ve become used to digital versions […]
Monday, 03 July, 2023 by Joshua Pauling
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” So wrote English historian and politician Lord Acton in an 1887 letter to Archbishop Mandell Creighton. It was a few years earlier in 1883 when, across the Atlantic, prominent American writer and orator Robert Ingersoll encapsulated a similar sentiment: “nothing discloses real character like the use […]
Monday, 08 May, 2023 by Joshua Pauling
Joshua Pauling (JP): Thank you, Sam, for agreeing to discuss the power of story, and your stories, too. You’ve written a best-selling adventure series The Green Ember, (which my children love, by the way) and now a new book Jack Zulu and the Waylander’s Key, co-authored with your son, Josiah. To start, tell me a […]
Friday, 03 March, 2023 by Joshua Pauling, S. D. Smith
In 1533, Philip Melanchthon gave a speech entitled “On the Miseries of Teachers.” Melanchthon, a Reformer well-versed in educational philosophy and honored by his contemporaries with the title of “Praeceptor Germaniae” (the Teacher of Germany), bemoaned the attitude of students: “they insult us, they wrinkle their noses, they make faces behind our backs when we […]
Wednesday, 16 November, 2022 by Joshua Pauling
*** 1517 Publishing | 2021 | 224 pages (paperback) | $21.85 Magnus Persson, a successful pastor in the charismatic church for many years, is now a minister in the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church. How did that happen? In Reclaiming the Reformation, Persson answers that question en route to offering a larger call to reformational Christianity. […]
Tuesday, 01 November, 2022 by Joshua Pauling
We Christians love to talk about ideas and their consequences. Take R.C. Sproul’s The Consequences of Ideas. Or Richard Weaver’s 1948 classic Ideas Have Consequences, which has remained quite popular among conservative Christians ever since its publication. As one who was a high school history teacher for many years, I absolutely love the history of […]
Wednesday, 12 October, 2022 by Joshua Pauling
As Romans 8 builds to the crescendo that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:39), Paul inserts a jarring Old Testament quotation: “for your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered” (Ps. 44:22). […]
Wednesday, 14 September, 2022 by Joshua Pauling
Why is Christianity true? Considering the language frequently used to describe what it means to be Christian, we might conclude that it is true because I believe it is true. I asked Jesus into my heart. I accepted Jesus as my personal savior. I made Jesus Lord of my life. I believe in Jesus with […]
Friday, 08 July, 2022 by Joshua Pauling
“I pledge allegiance.” Three words that immediately bring to mind the American flag and that daily classroom ritual from kindergarten through twelfth grade. When my youngest sister started kindergarten, I remember her coming home the first week and asking the family at the dinner table if we all knew “the incredible agents.” We were befuddled. […]
Friday, 10 June, 2022 by Joshua Pauling
Yet another round of social commentary has been unleashed in the aftermath of Lia Thomas’ recent victory at the NCAA swimming nationals. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Lia is a biological male, who, until last year, swam on the men’s team at Penn. But this year, swimming in the female category as […]
Wednesday, 04 May, 2022 by Joshua Pauling
What is a trickster tale? According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, “the trickster-tale genre of folklore appears in some form in every culture” and usually features “a protagonist (often an anthropomorphized animal) who has magical powers and who is characterized as a compendium of opposites.” The trickster-hero frequently “serves as a sort of folkloric scapegoat onto which […]
Wednesday, 13 April, 2022 by Joshua Pauling
There is a nostalgic allure associated with the family farm and home industry of yesteryear, where once upon a time families labored together towards a common goal, with achievements physically manifested in the world; a field plowed, a fence mended, a crop harvested. It’s easy to romanticize this pre-industrial norm, overlooking its challenges and difficulties: […]
Friday, 11 March, 2022 by Joshua Pauling