Culture

The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Such an error conceives of the good-evil dichotomy ...

While there is a place for condemning, critiquing, consuming and copying culture, the primary posture Christ followers are to have in the world is as culture makers. In regard to history, the word cul...

Culture is like gravity. We never talk about it, except in physics classes. We don’t include gravity in our weekly planning processes. No one gets up thinking about how gravity will affect their day. ...

The suffering addressed in 1 Peter is not random misfortune but the social cost of a new identity that challenges prevailing cultural norms.

In this short excerpt, the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass describes the tension between faith in Christ and faith in a form of Christianity willing to enslave an entire race of peopl...

Nothing illustrates evangelicals’ infatuation with politics more clearly than a story related by a Christian lawyer. Considering whether to take a job in the nation’s capital, he consulted with the le...

One of the gravest dangers to the Christian faith is its wholesale appropriation of the larger culture. When this happens, the citizens of those places cannot recognize the difference between their cu...

Jesus Prepares for Departure John 17 is part of a larger section of John’s gospel known as the farewell discourses (13:31-17:26), in which Jesus prepares for his imminent departure from earth after h...

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...

Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.

Jesus is understood in the light of the assumptions which control our culture.  When “reason” is invoked as a parallel or supplementary authority to “Scripture” and “tradition,” what is happening is t...

Jesus Prepares for Departure John 17 is part of a larger section of John’s gospel known as the farewell discourses (13:31-17:26), in which Jesus prepares for his imminent departure from earth after h...

In the excellent book, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes , Brandon J. O’Brien shares a helpful illustration of how different churches deal with alcohol very differently: When I (Brandon) w...

Note from TPW: Kara Martin addresses life in the secular workplace, sharing insights to help you lead your congregations to understand their faith and work and also to bring the Kingdom into your o...

Gracious God, in six days you created all things. On the seventh day you finished your work by resting. You also blessed and hallowed the seventh day, setting it aside as a day of rest. Teach me, Lord...

Gracious God, we don’t live as Christ did. Although You give us specific instructions for an ordered way of life that stands out from the rest of the world, we settle for lukewarm Christianity. Our li...

Loving and grace-filled God, we confess that it is difficult to keep you first in our lives. There are so many urgent demands on us that we find it hard to focus ourselves on you. The culture around u...

Culture is not inherited like a genetic code. Instead, culture becomes layers and layers added by our society and our surrounding environment.

What do the royals and a Rorschach test have in common? Both provoke reactions that tell us more about the attitudes and beliefs of the beholder than about the object of their gaze. This is not to say...

For purposes of practicality and relatability, this series considers the Sea of Galilee to be a lake and classifies other fresh or mostly fresh water locations together under the same banner. Th...

Materialism is not fundamentally an economic problem, but a cultural one... a spiritual issue. It runs to the depths of our souls, and, for this reason, needs to be understood less in terms of budgets...

Different Attitudes on Prayer This past Sunday was the first time I've been in worship at our local church in some time, and it was a wonderful service. The liturgy was inspiring, the praise musi...

Ancient Lens What's the historical context? Dissolving the Divisions Generally speaking, the Psalms divide the people of the earth into two groups: “Israel” and “the nations.” Psalm 98 surpr...

Preaching Commentary Dissolving the Divisions The Psalms divide—we would call it an over-simplification—the earth’s inhabitants into “Israel” and “the nations” (the earth). Psalm 98, quite interest...

The city is the fulfillment of the purposes of the Eden of God. The city is the fulfiller of the paradise of God... which is tied to the future city with the original, sinless past of Eden and its res...

All crises are judgments of history that call into question an existing state of affairs. They sift and sort the character and condition of a nation and its capacity to respond. The deeper the crisis,...

In the old American South (and in many places in the American North) a European American who invited an African American as a guest to an expensive restaurant in a white section of town would subject ...

As a missionary … it was always comforting to realize that I did not bring God along with my physical and cultural baggage to my new host country.

I found out the hard way that if we don’t disciple people, the culture sure will.

Culture is what we make of the world. Culture is, first of all, the name for our relentless, restless human effort to take the world as it’s given to us and make something else.