Rev. Geoffrey Lentz is a local United Methodist pastor. Some years ago before he went to seminary and learned better he was a student of mine. He sent a letter to Lifeway Christian Stores regarding their placement of a magazine about women pastors behind the counter. He sent me a copy and graciously gave permission…
Today is Blog Action Day, and though I didn’t get around to formally participating, I’m going to write a short post on dealing with poverty from a Christian perspective. I’m feeling idealistic, so beware! Since I first started thinking about issues of poverty, way back when I was a teenager (and fish were just working…
There are some basics about what evolution is and is not, and what the various positions of both creationists and evolutionists are, that everyone who steps into the debate should know. Some examples include the difference between a young earth and an old earth creationist. I’ve seen a few discussions in internet fora in which…
Laura at Pursuing Holiness has a post titled How can Christians support Obama?. She begins: I am frustrated almost beyond belief that any Christian can support Obama. . . . She then outlines the reasons she has for believing that we cannot support Obama and provides links, describing these points as “well-substantiated.” Laura’s post falls…
As a follow-up to my notes on God’s Problem, I would like to comment briefly on how a diversity of explanations do coexist, and how they might justifiably do so. First, despite our best efforts to find logical explanations, in general people use case by case explanations pretty readily. They may believe that one person…
Bryon’s Weblog has a quote from Leland Ryken and some commentary, followed by some rather silly comments by an obvious troll. What I found interesting here, however, was the idea of preserving the literary qualities of the Bible. Let me reproduce the quote Bryon used: “If your essentially literal translation is the RSV, the ESV,…
Ehrman, Bart D. God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question-Why We Suffer. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-06-117397-4. 294 pp. I have previously noted that Bart Ehrman’s books are much more controversial on their jackets than on their pages (see notes on The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot and Response…
DeSilva, David A. An Introduction to the New Testament: Contexts, Methods, and Ministry Formation. Downers Grove, IL, 2004. ISBN 0-8308-2746-3. 974 pp. (904 without front matter and indexes). This is a bit out of place for review here and by me, but I wanted to write a few notes about it anyhow. If I were…
I was interested in watching the reactions to the debate the other night. No, I didn’t watch it, so I’m not going to give any opinion about who won or lost, or who was right. But in the blogs to which I subscribe I found two posts that were very interesting to me. The questions…
. . . will be at Metacatholic, and he is calling for submissions as comments to the post I’m linking right here.
