Postmodernism
“It's official: Truth is dead. Facts are passe.” So declared The Washington Post back in 2016 when they reported on Oxford Dictionary’s decision to select for their international word of the year: “post-truth.” The official definition reads: relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. [...]
“You shall be like God, knowing good and evil,” the serpent told Eve. Our contemporary culture loves to give us similar advice. Who can be sure what God really said? Better to choose your own identity, express your own personality, construct your own social media profile. Decide what’s right for you, what brings you happiness, […]
*** IVP | 2021 | 232 pages (hardcover) | $22.00 Lately, the use of apologetics has fallen on rough times. To be sure, classical, empiricist, and presuppositionalist apologetics are still useful schools of thought and their arguments are no less important. But those who are ready and able to wax eloquently about them, the ones […]
It often feels like the church is dividing along political lines. When we declare a church to be conservative or liberal, we are often not referring to theological stances (as J. Gresham Machen did in his classic Christianity and Liberalism), but to political ideology and cultural stances. Those who try to hold these parties together […]
Diagnosis Modern ethics—in the broad sense of “ethics since Kant,” in the narrow sense of “the notion of ethics that people now living have absorbed,” and in whatever other meaning of the term you might care to adopt—is not doing so well. A diverse chorus of witnesses (including G. K. Chesterton, Franz Kafka, Dorothy Sayers, […]
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 […]
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolutionby Carl R. TruemanCrossway, 2020432 pages (hardcover), $34.99 “For all intents and purposes, I am a woman.” That was Bruce (now Caitlyn) Jenner, the 1976 men’s decathlon Olympic gold medalist, announcing in a 2015 interview with Diane […]
Pluralism has emerged as a hot topic among Christians today. This can suggest that it is a new phenomenon, representing a thoroughly unique situation with new tensions and benefits. But as Ecclesiastes states, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Although the extent of modern pluralism is new, God’s people have encountered the competitive interaction […]
According to a 2018 report from the Pew Research Center, Most American adults self-identify as Christians. But many Christians also hold what are sometimes characterized as “New Age” beliefs—including belief in reincarnation, astrology, psychics and the presence of spiritual energy in physical objects like mountains or trees. . . . Overall, roughly six-in-ten American adults […]
In 2015, a Pew survey on religion was released that confirmed the greatest hopes of some and the greatest fears of others—Christianity is in decline in America.1 Or is it? After digging through the data, Ed Stetzer pointed out that “convictional Christianity” is actually holding steady but “nominal Christianity” is hemorrhaging. The real story, Stetzer […]
In my article “Learning How to Live and Thrive with Post-Postcolonial Missions” in the last issue of Modern Reformation (September/October 2019), we started a new topic that I would like to finish off now. I proposed that evangelical missions works according to one of two paradigms, colonial missions and postcolonial missions, with a third paradigm […]
Protestant theology and missiology have been experiencing a flood, and it seems to be surging right now. It started trickling back in the 1970s and has been building ever since. It is a flood of books all framed by a single umbrella issue. Let me frame it as a question: “Who are you?” It is […]
American Christians are standing at a crossroads. Our society is becoming more hostile to Christianity in general and believers individually. In the face of rapid secularization, political uncertainty, economic instability, and ideological confusion, we must decide whether or not we will stand for the truth, or capitulate to the pressure. American society does not want […]
"Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self" by Marilynne Robinson
Good books that are well written are an increasing rarity these days. That is why it is always a pleasure to find a new volume from the pen of Marilynne Robinson, who is not only a novelist of distinction but also a careful and stylish essayist. In Absence of Mind she turns her attention to […]
Michael Horton, co-host of the White Horse Inn, recently spoke with Dr. Peter Berger, University Professor of Sociology and Theology at Boston University and director of the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture. A member of many scientific societies, he has received honorary degrees from Loyola University and the Universities of Notre Dame, Geneva, […]
