Worldview and Perspective on Modern Life

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What is Wrong with Us according to Traditional and Modern Cultures

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Scripture

Luke 18:14, Proverbs 29:23, Isaiah 2:11, 1 Peter 5:5, Romans 12:3, James 4:6, Proverbs 16:18

Up until the twentieth century, traditional cultures (and this is still true of most cultures in the world) always believed that too high a view of yourself was the root cause of all the evil in the w...

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Losing Sight of our Spiritual Longing in the Modern World

Author

Annie Dillard

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Scripture

1 Kings 19:11-12, Job 38:1-7, Isaiah 6:1-5 , Romans 1:20, Luke 19:39-40 , Psalm 19:1-4

In our modern materialistic world, it is easy to lose sight of that sense of longing. In her wonderful collection of essays Teaching a Stone to Talk , Annie Dillard speaks about that growing void...

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God in the Dock

Author

C. S. Lewis

Keywords

Scripture

Job 40:2, Isaiah 45:9, Daniel 4:35, Isaiah 55:8-9

The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge...

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Keywords

Scripture

Romans 5:3-5, 2 Corinthians 12:7-10, Ecclesiastes 3:1-11, Luke 10:38-42, Psalm 119:15, Matthew 10:38-42

For a long time it seemed to me that real life was about to begin, but there was always some obstacle in the way. Something had to be got through first, some unfinished business; time still to be serv...

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Author

Andrew Sullivan

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Modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increa...

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How Religious Stories (and Religion) Are Understood Today

Author

Gregory Koukl

Keywords

Most people nowadays would not say the religious stories believers believe are actually false. (It would be impolite to put it that way and might even be considered intolerant). At the same time, thou...

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The CNN Effect

Author

Ryan Holiday

Keywords

Scripture

Philippians 4:8, Romans 12:2, Luke 21:34, Psalm 46:10, Matthew 6:22-23

In the 1990s, political scientists began to study what they called the “CNN Effect.” Breathless, twenty-four-hour media coverage makes it considerably harder for politicians and CEOs to be anything bu...

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What is the Internet? Yesterday's Confusion is Today's Assumption

Author

JR Woodward

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Scripture

Isaiah 40:8, Hebrews 13:8, James 1:17, Matthew 24:35, Colossians 2:8

A YouTube video from the Today Show in 1994 shows Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric asking each other “What is the Internet?” and debating if the “@” symbol means “at” or “about.” The world is very diffe...

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Author

James C. Coleman

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As the modern day person struggles with the baffling question of his own existence… science falls short of providing full answers… it can tell how, but not why.” Coleman adds, “Despite their fine auto...

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Living with Pain in a World Governed by Technique

Author

Alan Noble

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 11:1-9, Exodus 16:13-36, Ecclesiastes 1:12-18, Luke 10:38-42, 2 Corinthians 12:7-10, Psalm 127:1-2

Living in a society governed by technique conditions us to believe that in every way life is easier than it ever has been. Technique is the use of rational methods to maximize efficiency, and we...

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The Charm of Beauty is to Win Hearts

Author

James Bryan Smith

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 6:28-29, 1 Peter 3:3-4, Proverbs 31:30, Romans 1:25

Recently, when I was in London, I went to the National Gallery. It was a weekday, but it was still crowded with people wearing headsets, staring at famous paintings, listening to a narrator explain th...

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Author

Lillian Daniel

Keywords

Scripture

Psalm 95:4-5, Psalm 19:1-6, Romans 1:20, Psalm 104:24-25

These people always find God in the sunsets. And in walks on the beach. Sometimes I think these people never leave the beach or the mountains, what with all the communing with God they do on hilltops,...

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Author

Eugene Peterson

Keywords

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier...

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The United States is Like Samaria

Author

Phillip Yancey

Keywords

Scripture

Jeremiah 29:4-7 , 2 Kings 17:24-33, Isaiah 1:18-20, John 4:4-26, Acts 8:4-8, 14-17, Psalm 46:1-2

The United States retains a basic respect for religion though it may be following European trends: surveys show a steady rise in the “nones” (now one-third of those under the age of thirty), that is, ...

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Modern Knowledge

Author

Mike Cosper

Keywords

Thoughts

Modern knowledge involves breaking things down into component parts. As philosopher Michel Foucault argues in The Birth of the Clinic, nowhere is this more disturbingly clear than in modern medicine, ...

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Author

Carl Honoré

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Sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life instead of the...

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The Slowness is the Point

Author

Brian Zahnd

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 40:31, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 , Matthew 11:28-30, Luke 10:38-42, Philippians 4:6-7, Psalm 131:1-2

[T]he old adage “it’s the journey, not the destination that matters most” is particularly true of modern pilgrimage. If the destination is the point, I can get to Santiago from anywhere in the world i...

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False Narrative: You Are An Accident

Author

James Bryan Smith

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 1:26-27, Ecclesiastes 3:11, Job 33:4 , John 1:1-4, Colossians 1:16-17, Psalm 139:13-16

The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy describes a view (not his own view, because Tolstoy was a Christian) of the human person, based on a theory of reality he saw emerging in his day. It is a narrative that...

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What is the Christian Imagination Deficit? How Do We Fix It?

Author

Brian Brown

Keywords

There Are No Ordinary Things J. R. R. Tolkien tells a short story about an ordinary fellow who just wants to finish a painting. Over time, he is constantly distracted by the requests of his neighbors...

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Psalm 22 | Feeling Forsaken by God

Author

Scott B. Bullock

Keywords

Scripture

Psalm 22:, Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34, Hebrews 2:12

Ancient lens What’s the historical context? A Structured Complaint The Psalmist organizes his complaint against God in three sections. The first two sections dramatize the complaint (vv. 1-11 and...

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Psalm 8 | God's Majesty

Author

Scott B. Bullock

Keywords

Scripture

Psalm 8:, Psalm 144:3, Job 7:17, Hebrews 2:6-10, Matthew 21:16, 1 Corinthians 1:27-29

Ancient Lens What’s the historical context? Background Structure This Psalm of David is unique. “It is the only hymn in the Old Testament composed completely as a direct address to God.” [1] It e...

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The Birth (or Re-Emergence) of Evangelical Social Action

Author

Soong-Chan Rah

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In 1947, budding theologian Carl F. H. Henry wrote a short book titled The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. In it he surveys the American fundamentalist movement’s engagement with the most ...

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On Changing your Mind

Author

Stuart R. Strachan, Jr.

Keywords

Scripture

Proverbs 16:25, Isaiah 55:8-9, Proverbs 28:26, James 4:13-15, 1 Corinthians 8:2, Proverbs 14:12, Luke 7:30

Joseph Lister was a British surgeon and the founder of anti-septic medicine. That may sound incredibly boring, but the effects of his discovery were profound. Prior to Lister, surgeons had virtually n...

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Author

C. S. Lewis

Keywords

I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends, and myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know none of them are like this. Of this [gospel] text there are only two possible ...

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Adjusting our Vision

Author

Jonathan Grant

Keywords

Scripture

Romans 12:1-2, Colossians 2:8, 1 John 2:15-17, 1 Corinthians 10:23-33, Mark 7:8-9

When my grandparents were in their eighties, their television developed a fault that made the screen permanently bright green. It was good for viewing garden shows or nature programs, but it was prett...

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His House of Cards

Author

Austin Fischer

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A few years ago, a pastor of an evangelical-fundamentalist church with whom I’m acquainted announced on the Sunday after Easter that he had become an atheist. He told his stunned congregation that he ...

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Psalm 19 | Creation Reflects God

Author

Stuart R. Strachan, Jr.

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 5:17, Psalm 19:

Introduction During my time in seminary (and the year after I graduated) I spent a lot of time at a church in southern New Jersey. It’s actually how I met Scott Bullock, TPW board member and creator...

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Author

Richard Smalley

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Science and Religion

Recently I have gone back to church regularly with a new focus to understand as best I can what it is that makes Christianity so vital and powerful in the lives of billions of people today, even thoug...

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A Remote Village

Author

Timothy Jennings

Keywords

Scripture

1 John 4:9-10, Romans 8:3, Colossians 1:19-20, 2 Corinthians 8:9, Isaiah 53:4-5, Hebrews 2:14

Imagine a remote village in Africa. No modern Westerner has ever set foot there. The natives live off the land, using the same ancient methods and tools as their forefathers used for the last thousand...

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Author

Edward Casey

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In the past three centuries in the West—the period of “modernity”—place has come to be not only neglected but actively suppressed. Owing to the triumph of the natural and social sciences in this same ...

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