All posts relating to religion, including those on the relationship of religion to other fields, such as science and politics
C. Michael Patton has an interesting post today taken from his introduction to theology students. I would particularly like any number of the folks in the various Sunday School classes I teach to absorb some of the material. This is not because I generally agree. I perceive myself to be both to the left and…
In the good old days when I used to have a seminar on this topic that I used in churches, I had an overhead transparency that showed the age of the earth (along with some of the various geological time periods). This was represented by a line that went the length of the slide. Beside…
I received an e-mail from the AFA giving me the wonderful news that the governor of Kentucky has backed down on calling the Christmas tree in the state capitol a “holiday tree” and will call it a Christmas tree. In order to help this happen elsewhere, I’m told to buy packets of buttons, wear them,…
Todd C. Wood, a baraminologist (he studies “kinds” as in Genesis 1), has written an excellent post about how we Christians often make idols of our particular arguments (HT: The Austringer). Now as far as I can see, Dr. Wood and I would find ourselves on the opposite side of most debates about origins, but…
It’s always great to receive cases of new books, and yesterday was no exception as our first copies of Megabelt arrived. I wrote earlier (Beware Friends Bearing Manuscripts) about receiving the manuscript for this little book. Since then we have done considerable work with it, produced what I think is a truly unique and creative…
Having made plenty of detours in both my physical and spiritual life, I really appreciated this post from Pen of the Wayfarer.
Talk is cheap, and I’m a good talker. This past Sunday I visited a new Sunday School class and met a young man who told me that he was opposed to abortion. He went on to say that he believed that if you talked about something you should be willing to act, and in his…
The Internet Monk has become must read amongst the many blogs I scan. Today, his post How to Talk to an Evangelical on a Journey is exceptionally good reading. As you can guess from my title, I do have one note, and if you know me, you may be aware that I can’t help introducing…
Recently Dave Black made a comment regarding the way in which we hold certain correct doctrines (HT: Dave Black Online. I’m just going to quote one sentence here, which was as much as I could quote in a tweet: … sometimes even biblically correct positions can be reduced to a dogmatic narrowness, formalism, and fundamentalism….
I find this an interesting question. But before I comment, let me summarize and quote Scot McKnight’s article. He first notes that from the early liturgies to the Westminster Confession there is a certain common pattern in worship, one which is dropped by what he calls “low church evangelicalism.” Amongst the elements he includes the…
