Culture
In the car today, I happened upon a disturbing radio interview. The guest was a poet and designer of transgender and queer clothing whose world (ironically) seemed morally black-and-white. […]
The last few years have seen a global pandemic, civil unrest, and increased political division. These miasmas of polarization, alienation, and apathy have been accompanied by stranger trends […]
On June 8, 1554, John Calvin labored, as usual, in haste. “I have no time to write at the moment,” he told Guillaume Farel, “because it is nearly time for my theology lecture, and I have not yet had the opportunity to reflect on what I will say.” […]
I was saddened by some of the conclusions of Daniel Treier’s article. He attributes the “rabid anti-Communism and (at best) indifference to racism” to “American pugnaciousness.” He repeats this charge by criticizing a “loss of proportion about Communism exacerbated a lack of perspective about racism” (62). First, conflating Communism with anti-racism is obscene. Yes, Communists have […]
January/February 2022 I would like to take issue with a point in George Marsden’s interesting and even enlightening article. When discussing the ways in which evangelicalism has incorporated political beliefs over the years, he points to the recent disagreements concerning mask mandates, stating: “It is hard to think of any principle in biblical ethics that […]
The answer to this question depends—not surprisingly—on what we mean by “fundamentalism.” As a religious designation, the term is just over a century old. Yet it never had just one meaning, and over the decades, these principal meanings have changed. So, to avoid confusion, we need to stay alert to these various meanings and be […]
In 1994, Klaus Schmidt discovered a temple in southwestern Anatolia (Turkey) that dates back almost 10,000 years—the earliest Neolithic period, just after the last ice age. As usual, he said, “First comes the temple, then the city.” Human beings are innately religious. We know this from Scripture, of course. In Romans 1, Paul explains that […]
Liberty for All: Defending Everyone’s Religious Freedom in a Pluralistic AgeAndrew T. WalkerBrazos Press, 2021267 pages (paperback), $19.99 The past decade has been marked by seismic shifts in American political opinion. Remarkably, however, most Americans, despite many recent high-profile court battles, still support religious liberty—at least insofar as they do not want their sincerely held […]
On Power He was a man who had stumbled into a little bit of power and seized it with both hands. She’d known that within the first few hours of his arrival, when he’d chosen the best room and gathered up the warmest blankets for his bed, when he’d taken all the pillows in the […]
There’s this town I know that’s got great public spirit. Boy Scouts is a big deal. The country clubs are nice. The Rotary Club owns the town, they say, and the Kiwanis runs it. The United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Cathedral, and the big Presbyterian Church are full on Christmas and Easter. The Republicans and […]
Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue but fitness.” So wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in his Der Antichrist. For most Christians, such a bold assertion will sit ill at ease for them, to understate the matter. This push for power by means of might and combat is not easy to marry with […]
In the aftermath of World War I, and during the 1918–19 Spanish flu pandemic, William Butler Yeats wrote the now nearly ubiquitous line, Things fall apart the center cannot hold. Borrowing imagery from Christian apocalyptic writings, Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” conveys the sense of overwhelming disaster. Things are not just different. They are disintegrating. […]
If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (John 15:18–19). With these words, […]
Timon Cline interviewed Professor Carl Trueman on his latest book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2020), which includes a foreword by Rod Dreher. TC: Although there’s a lot packed into The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self—and it’s not short—could […]
In 2016, The Economist Espresso asked an intriguing question on April 23, Shakespeare’s birthday: “Would you agree that you find Shakespeare relevant today?” The survey found that in Brazil (85 percent) and Mexico (82 percent), the answer was yes, followed close behind by India, China, Turkey, and South Africa. Yet only half of British and […]
