Featured Essay / Culture
A friend and I had a conversation about a situation of systemic and personal abuse she was suffering, which turned into correspondence between us. With permission, I have polished up my exchange with Lori (a pseudonym), as a reflection on what it means for a victim to properly love a…
Essay / Culture
Thank God for shorthand. Without it, the ready wit of Martin Luther would be lost to us. Some argue that Luther’s were the loose lips which sank the great ship; others hear him as a voice crying the wilderness who merely called a spade a
Essay / Culture
Coolness is heretical. Or at least the pursuit of it is. This is because an inverse relationship exists between our attempts at being cool and our faith in Jesus Christ. The one struts, confident in his ability to do and say all the right things.
Essay / Culture
Back in 1960, Valerie Saiving Goldstein wrote a short article called “The Human Situation: A Feminine View” in which she made a simple assertion: men and women sin differently. In her own words: The temptations of woman as woman are not the same as the
Essay / Culture
That’s not fair! When you live in a house with children you come to realize that the concept of fair/unfair is the lens through which they view most of the world. For example, when there is only one piece of chocolate cake in the house
Essay / Culture
Next month, a book of Mother Teresa’s personal letters will be released. Almost nobody’s read it, but everybody’s talking about it anyway, especially the fact that Mother Teresa (1910-1997) was long racked with doubt and a sense that God had withdrawn from her life. According
Essay / Art
How did Aeschylus do it? His plays are so powerful and engaging that he will never lose his place in the front ranks of dramatists. We only have seven of his plays extant —a tenth of what he produced— but even if we had only
Essay / Culture
Imagine a world where slavery is still a normal part of our daily lives. What if the North under Abraham Lincoln’s presidency assented to the demands of the Southern states and allowed for both the continuation of slavery and the creation of new slave states?
Essay / Culture
Everyone has something to say about Harry Potter. It is such a major phenomenon that people can’t keep themselves from talking about it, but in truth Harry Potter is dreadful and vulgar—and that is not a bad thing. My first encounter with Harry Potter books
Essay / Culture
While his Christology leaves much to be desired, the grandfather of liberal Protestant theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) has some great thoughts on ecclesiology. Consider the following: [T]here are frequently also efforts at union which do not originate in the Spirit of the Church, and the
Essay / Culture
It seems that the emerging church (hate to use that singular, but it’s convenient) scratches a couple of different itches amongst evangelicals. On the one hand, it is hailed as a fresh expression of evangelicalism’s ever-outgoing nature. It is contextualization for the sake of conversion.
Essay / Culture
Well, Harry Potter has once again hit the stores, to the rowdy “Hurrah!” of millions of devotees (one of whom blogs frequently about the boy wizard on this website). I imagine that Amazon.com employees have really racked up the overtime this week while the US
Essay / Culture
If anything, for emerging churches, smaller is better. But why? Like any renewal movement in the church, the emerging church movement hearkens back to the good ol’ days of Acts 2. These were days of community, economic simplicity and radical discipleship, days when the church