In a recent opinion piece at Business Insider, Shana Lebowitz proclaimed, “Divorce isn’t a failure…In fact, it could mean your marriage was a success!” According to the relationship experts cited by Lebowitz, the goal of marriage isn’t that two people become one flesh, or create a family, or even share lifelong love. No, the purpose of marriage, these so-called experts claim, is that we grow as individuals. Even marriages that end in divorce can accomplish that goal!
No one names their son Jehoahaz. It’s just too tough to pronounce. On the other hand, most of us know a Josiah or two. Not only is it a much more pronounceable, but as we read in 2 Kings chapter 22, “Josiah was eight years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem thirty-one years… He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and followed completely the ways of his father David, not turning aside to the right or to the left.”
Remember that 1980’s cough syrup commercial when Chris Robinson said, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV”? I wanted to paraphrase these immortal words when I read what actor Joaquin Phoenix of “Gladiator” fame said about his role as Jesus in the upcoming movie, “Mary Magdalene.” Phoenix is not the Son of Man, but he plays him on the big screen. His is a very different Jesus than the one we meet in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Philosopher John Gray started his 2007 book “Black Mass” with this declaration: “Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion.” Now, Gray is an atheist, but he realized that so much of modern politics is an attempt to re-inspire a world originally inspired by religion, especially Christianity.
In the 1976 made-for-television movie, “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,” a then-unknown John Travolta introduced Americans to a condition technically called “X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency.” Or, as people have called it since the movie, “bubble boy disease.”
The death toll from the Easter Sunday terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka continued to climb all week. As of Thursday, the official count was 359 dead.
As the Notre Dame cathedral burned, many mourned—some for the destruction of history and beauty and others because it was one of the world’s most iconic houses of Christian worship, where for centuries, French Catholics lifted up prayer, song, and sacrament to God.
There’s a passage in N. T. Wright’s masterpiece, “The Resurrection of the Son of God,” in which he describes two kinds of people who refuse to even consider that Jesus actually rose from the dead: “hard-headed historians and soft-headed theologians.”
In February, the Yale Law School chapter of the Federalist Society invited Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom to speak on campus. This, to put it mildly, didn’t go over well with some of the law school’s more “woke” students. Using talking points straight from the Southern Poverty Law Center, students protested Waggoner’s visit, calling the ADF a “homophobic, transphobic hate group.”
I’ve said before on BreakPoint that if your God never tells you to do anything you don’t want to do, your god is probably you. If there were an Americanized translation of the Apostle’s Creed for today, it would be something like this: “I believe in God the Father, Almighty, who always supports my feelings.”
