Citing examples from TV, pop music, and best-selling books, an article in Entertainment Weekly noted that "pop culture is going gaga for spirituality." However, [S]eekers of the day are apt to peel away the tough theological stuff and pluck out the most dulcet elements of faith, coming up with a soothing sampler of Judeo-Christian imagery, […]
In Against the Protestant Gnostics (1987), I argued that Gnosticism, an ever-recurring heresy within Christianity, was resurfacing in modern guise within North American Protestantism. Two decades later, Gnostic characteristics within Protestant Christianity have reached proportions that I could not have imagined, and have affected the social and political fabric of the United States in ways […]
Recent reports from the Pew Research Center (see Mollie Z. Hemingway's "Between the Times" for more information) show that America's religious landscape is changing rapidly and substantially: religion-hopping and religion-dropping are proceeding with a speed and industry never before seen in the modern West. Meanwhile, in a recent Atlantic Monthly (March 2008), several authors declared […]
Men, I'm told, do not read the Bible. This is explained away by the idea that men do not read, period. Apparently, we're knuckle-dragging Neanderthals who hoot at women, scratch ourselves and laugh at bodily noises. We watch sports (only the violent kind), we watch TV (only the violent kind), but we do not read-or […]
Reprinted from "The Effects of Popular Culture on Religion" (Modern Reformation, January/February 1997). "Popular culture" is a slippery and deceptive term for a massive and unwieldy reality. As in other controversies, many arguments about popular culture are frustrating because there is no prior agreement on exactly what is being talked about. Sometimes "popular culture" is […]
Assessing the Importance of the New Spirituality The New Spirituality is “neither an organized religion nor a systematized philosophy but a group of ideas and a network of communication.” (1) Such an innocuous description is still somewhat typical-the New Spirituality is just one more option in modern day pluralism, about which we should probably be […]
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Manuscripts hidden for centuries have resurfaced unexpectedly. When their secret contents are disclosed, scholars will be forced to rewrite the history books, and the Christian church will suffer a blow from which it may never recover. (Cue the ominous and conspiratorial theme music here.) For it turns […]
You may have noticed that I'm not using my name in this article. It's not (total) cowardice, but when you tell others that you have spent over 20 years in a cult, you imagine some perplexed reactions. There must have been something very wrong with you or, if not, you must have suffered terrible mental […]
It has been a long time since I have read a book that has portrayed such an important topic in such a progressive manor. I found myself stopping numerous times through the first 50 pages wondering if I had understood what the author was saying-not because this is a hard book to read, but because […]
Until a pastor has trained officers, he may entertain the assumption, like I did, that there is plenty of quality material out there to choose from, and that the real challenge will be narrowing the stack down to one or two helpful resources. When one actually begins searching for books or manuals on officer training, […]
Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875)-the godfather of much of modern evangelical theology, piety, and practice-attacked the establishment by ecclesiastical authority of a confessional standard as no better than the papacy (see Charles Finney's Systematic Theology, new expanded edition, edited by Dennis Carroll [Bethany House, 1994], p. 3). In the tradition of Finney's jeremiad against ecclesiastical or […]
Paul Tripp begins A Quest for More with a declaration and a question: "God has given you the gift of his Son, not to make your little kingdom successful, but to welcome you to a much better kingdom. Now what in the world does that mean?" In other words, Quest is "a meditation on what […]
Commuting back and forth to Center City Philadelphia by train, I notice many people absorbed in reading. Beyond the daily newspaper consumers, there are a host of book readers. Unfortunately, judging by the book jackets, too many are indulging in bodice-ripping romances or the “Find Mr. Right and Never Have to Work Again” (or commute […]
It was disappointing that the movie version of C. S. Lewis's second chronicle of Narnia, Prince Caspian, did not stick as close to the story as that of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. There may not have been more scenes made up out of whole cloth and gratuitously inserted, but the ones which […]
