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American Politics

Voting, Praying, and Purity: Two Different Versions of Civil Religion

Pastor John Piper has written on why he (probably) won’t be voting in this month’s presidential election. Reading his argument, I couldn’t help wondering if voting has a cultic significance to Piper. As much as self-admitted Christian Trump-voters are characterized as cult followers, Never Trump Christians often strike me as…

by Mark HorneOctober 30, 2020
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Literature

Pastor Frankenstein

Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself… –– Victor Frankenstein In Mary Shelley’s classic novel, Victor Frankenstein is a young intellectual with an excessive thirst for glory and worldwide acclaim. Having lost his beloved mother, Frankenstein works to…

by Drew KnowlesOctober 27, 2020
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How to Worship

Against Practical Preaching

“Our daughter is just like a baby hippo,” my wife says to me as I hang my coat up. “After we watched a video of hippos munching whole watermelons, she sat down to her own watermelon lunch. She gobbled them up with those same puffy cheeks and big eyes.” My…

by John HigginsOctober 22, 2020
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Abortion

Evangelicals for Adolf: Christians in Hitler’s Germany

Christian compromise with Nazi Germany’s political leadership is well documented in painful detail. There was resistance, but it was the exception rather than the rule. German Christianity was terribly timid. Leadership lacked spiritual strength because of serious Biblical ignorance and unbelief. But it was not just the leaders. Christians in…

by Ralph Allan SmithOctober 20, 2020
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Abortion

For Whom Should a Christian Vote: Moral Reasoning and the 2020 Election

Can a Christian vote for Donald Trump? That might seem like a surprising question given the widespread evangelical support for the President. Yet for a growing number of evangelicals, to vote for Trump is to endorse his moral repugnancy and further discredit gospel-believing Christians who have sold their birthright for…

by Blake JohnsonOctober 13, 2020
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Hermeneutics

Two Yeshuas and a Fish

Thirty-eight years is a long time to take getting somewhere (Deut. 2:14). You could just ask anyone in the unfaithful generation of people whom God brought to the edge of the Promised Land the first time under Moses—if they were still alive, that is (Num. 14:22-23, 32-35). But there are…

by Eric RobinsonOctober 6, 2020

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Jacob Have I Loved

W illiam Johnstone points out in the first volume of his commentary on 1 & 2 Chronicles that the Chronicler's (C) list of the kings of Edom oddly repeats the phrase “then king so-and-so died and there reigned in his place” seven times. In part, this places greater stress on…

June 23, 2016

Jesus the Teacher

I f not unique, Robert Banks's Reenvisioning Theological Education is a rarity among studies of theological education in the amount of attention he devotes to biblical models of education and training. In reviewing recent literature on efforts to rethink seminary education, he notes again and again that little attention is…

June 23, 2016

Fulfilling Paganism

R obert Pogue Harrison ( The Dominion of the Dead ) spends several pages on Walter Pater's novel, Marius the Epicurean . A deathbed convert to Christianity, Marius is struck in his first encounter with the church by the continuities between Christianity and the oldest of Roman religions, the religion…

June 22, 2016

Ancient Memory

R emember the poor,” Paul told the Galatians. But what did that mean? Peter Brown ( The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity , 39-40) explains that “For early Christians, as for many other ancient persons, memory was far more than a passive storage space.…

June 22, 2016

Attention Deficit

A ccording to Lily Gurton-Wachter's Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention , “the first documentation of the disorder we now call Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” is found in “a medical text published in London in 1798.” Scottish physician Alexander Crichton described the “morbid alterations to which attention is subject”…

June 22, 2016

Can An Architect Save Us?

R obert Pogue Harrison calls the twentieth century “the fitful and prolonged continuation of a process that began in earnest a century earlier: the end of the Neolithic era” ( Dominion of the Dead , 31). One might think that we left the Neolithic a long time ago, but Harrison…

June 21, 2016

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