Like Advent, the season of Lent is about preparation. Before Christmas, our Christian forebears thought it wise to prepare a bit, and that by diving deeply into Old Testament promises and prophecies we’d better understand the birth of Christ in the full context of redemptive history. So too, in Lent, our Christian forbears thought it wise to prepare for Holy week, especially for celebrating the resurrection on Easter Sunday.
Young people are leaving the church in droves and unlike those who came before them, they aren't returning to church as they get older.
New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in an op-ed last week that while the nuclear family has always existed, without an extended circle of relatives, the structure is unstable. History seems to back him up.
Locusts and leprosy are the quintessential biblical calamities, but few of us in the West have experienced either personally. In some parts of the world, they are far more familiar. In fact, right now, upwards of 13 million people in East Africa face famine as the result of locust swarms.
It’s ironic how often orthodox Christians are accused of being obsessed with sex these days. After all, what’s more obsessive than investigating thousands of businesses to determine whether they’re “kind” and “inclusive” only to those who engage in certain types of sexual behavior, and not to anyone else?
It would be one thing if the Human Rights Campaign kept this obsession to themselves, but they’ve successfully weaponized their Equality Index as a formidable force of their obsession.
According to Esther O’Reilly, skeptics admitting to the Christian faith’s positive influence on history is only the headline of this story (although we’d be remiss to not include the recent book “Dominion” by Tom Holland as yet another example). O’Reilly thinks that under the surface, spiritual truth is being found too, much like the skeptics C. S. Lewis describes in the essay entitled “Myth Became Fact.”
Attempts to commercialize romantic love, what the Greeks called eros, is nothing new. But it’s quite clear that, in our Valentine’s Day traditions, we’ve lost the history of what was, historically, a feast day of the Church: The feast day of the third-century Christian martyr, Valentinus of Rome.
According to Koukl, “representing Christ in any era requires three skills.” First, we need a “basic knowledge necessary for the task.” Second, “Our knowledge must be tempered with the wisdom that makes our message clear and persuasive.” Finally, we must not forget that this knowledge and wisdom “are packaged in a Person.”
