culture on Religious Pluralism

Christmas in May I’m pretty sure it was Stephen Covey, back in the day ( The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People ) who originally said, “The main thing is to let the main thing be the main thing...

Human life in the western world today... is characterized by an enormously wide range of incompatible truth claims pertaining to human values, aspirations, norms, morality, and meaning— A hyperplurali...

It’s perfectly possible to have an orthodox Christianity that understands itself to be at the center of making human culture, while interacting with non-Christians and their cultural products who are ...

So it is that in most Western industrialized countries church and society have lost their identity, religion has become more and more a private affair, and morality has become secular. This process af...

More often than not, park-it-at-the-door thinking [about religious faith] has less to do with hostility to faith than with the avoidance of risk, for many employer’s fear that any hint of religion is ...

Most secularists are too politically savvy to attack religion directly or to debunk it as false. So what do they do? They consign religion to the value sphere—which takes it out of the realm of true a...

Cultural diversity was built into the Christian faith…in Acts 15, which declared that the new gentile Christians didn’t have to enter Jewish culture…. The converts had to work out…a Hellenistic way of...

We have the same biblical texts that earlier generations of Christians thought their way through, of course, but our reflections are shaped by six unique factors. (1) Especially in the Anglo-Saxon wo...

The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes-central role in education, that is exactly what i...

God built into the creation a variety of cultural spheres, such as the family, economics, politics, art, and intellectual inquiry. Each of these spheres has its own proper "business" and nee...

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...

The United States is undergoing a marked change in its attitude toward religion, and Christians here face new challenges. When a blogger named Marc Yoder wrote about “10 Surprising Reasons Our Kids Le...

We can’t separate what we believe in the political arena from who we are in Christ and what obedience to God demands...That said, not every tenet of Christianity should become the law of the state. We...

Any religious movement which adopts a purely critical and negative attitude to culture is therefore a force of destruction and disintegration which mobilizes against it the healthiest and most constru...

A Christianity that reflects its culture, whether that culture is Smith College or NASCAR, only lasts as long as it is useful to its host . That’s because it’s, at root, idolatry, and people turn from...

A major stumbling block for many earnest seekers is the compelling evidence throughout history that terrible things have been done in the name of religion. This applies to virtually all faiths at some...

I’ve asked strangers and casual acquaintances, “Why do Christians stir up such negative feelings?” Some bring up past atrocities, such as the widespread belief that the church executed eight or nine m...

The problem is not recognizing the importance of the individual. The problem is the glorification of the individual. When the individual self is glorified over the greater good of the community, right...

Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in [the twenty-first century] many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?

There is no social evil, no form of injustice whether of the feudal or the capitalist order which has not been sanctified in some way or other by religious sentiment and thereby rendered more impervio...

One of the areas often missed in a lot of Christian apologetics is the social setting in which a person encounters the gospel. For example, it is far easier to espouse "rational arguments" f...

In the mid-2000s, a Trans-Atlantic movement emerged, characterized by a rejection of organized religion and the ascent of what came to be known as the “New Atheism.” This trend gained notable traction...

By 2050, only about one-fifth of the world’s 3 billion Christians will be non-Hispanic Whites. Soon, the phrase ‘a White Christian’ may sound like a curious oxymoron, as mildly surprising as ‘a Swedis...

In Vanishing Grace , Philip Yancey examines the growing negative perceptions of evangelicals. Although the book was written in 2014, these dynamics have only intensified in the era of MAGA and Ch...

The problem was that . . . Christian values were always more popular in American culture than the Christian gospel. That’s why one could speak of “God and country” with great reception in almost any e...

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...

Since 1991, the adult population in the United States has grown by 15%. During that same period, the number of adults who do not attend church has nearly doubled, rising from 39 million to 75 million—...

Politics draws lines between people; in contrast, Jesus’ love cuts across those lines and dispenses grace. That does not mean, of course, that Christians should not involve themselves in politics. It ...

The development of different cultures didn’t take God by surprise! This is what the triune God intended from the beginning. Cultural difference and diversity was always a part of God’s original plan f...

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...