After nights of rioting and violence across America and even right outside the White House, the president punctuated his speech by walking from the Rose Garden to a historically important church that was nearly burned down the night before. He then posed with a Bible in hand beside the church sign.
The Bible should never be used as a prop.
Christians must not run for political or ideological corners. To the best of our ability, we must affirm all truths, even those hard to swallow, and we must deny all lies, even the ones that are politically expedient.
This week, Andy Crouch launches the third module of the Truth. Love. Together. virtual event, with a session on “The Kind of People the World Needs.” I cannot imagine anything more timely and relevant!
A recent study examining the sun is a reminder that God perfectly orchestrated our existence.
Over these past two months, I’ve concluded that none of the most important issues we face today as a culture were created by this virus. Rather, the virus exposed and accelerated issues that already mattered.
In the midst of a global pandemic that has killed a few hundred thousand people, unleashed a global recession, and will likely exacerbate food shortages and political instability around the world, one might wonder how introducing gender-neutral language became a United Nations priority.
It’s no coincidence that Xi Jinping doubled down on his own cult of personality and cracked down on religious freedom just as China’s economy began to slow. The renewed call to Chinese nationalism from Beijing effectively distracted the population from growing economic worries and offered an effective pretext for cracking down on Hong Kong protestors, many of whom see their protesting as an outworking of their Christian faith and as something for which they are willing to die.
Baylor historian Philip Jenkins predicts that in the people will think about church in terms of “BC…Before Coronavirus,” and after.
The key factor in Jenkin’s fascinating analysis is what we might call “pre-existing conditions.” In other words, in many ways, the coronavirus hasn’t so much created problems for the Church as it has revealed and accelerated them.
Evolutionary psychology is a field specializing in hypothesis in which natural selection explains all human behaviors. According to this way of thinking, all of our modern behaviors are best understood as carryovers from those ancient behaviors that offered our ancestors evolutionary advantage over others.
Ravi is a real-life example of what Paul told the men of Athens, that God places us in particular times in history. Ravi emerged at a time when many needed to see that faith could be deep, connected to the existential challenges of life while not only answering the skeptics and cynics, but challenging their assumptions and conclusions.
