In 2014, researchers at Northwestern University, Boston College, and the University of Melbourne published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , a prestigious academ...
Disagreement is refreshing when two men lovingly desire to compare their views to find out truth. Controversy is wretched when it is only an attempt to prove another wrong. Religious controversy does ...
Leviticus 25:10-17, Deuteronomy 15:7-11, Amos 5:11-15, James 82:, Luke 4:18-19
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...
Confrontation Most pastors don’t care for confrontation. Maybe, that could be said for most people. There are the rare few of us who thrive on the tension and drama that comes with a direct standoff,...
Anti-Intellectualism has been a problem in the church for some time now. Consider the words of the 17th century English clergyman Joseph Glanvill, who had this to say about the role of reason in faith...
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...
Pastor: Lord, we confess that too often we don’t live as people filled with the light of eternity. People: We complain. We focus on the problems we face and not the blessings you give. Pastor: W...
Gracious God, you have placed us in a culture that seems more and more filled with politics. Forgive us for every time we respond to these politics with decisions that do not honor Christ. Pardon us f...
There's a humorous, apocryphal story about a man standing by a river. On the opposite bank, a woman calls out, "How do I get to the other side of the river?" The man replies, "YOU A...
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, ...
The British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was once engaged in a conversation with a man who believed children should never receive any kind of religious education or instruction, not until they were ol...
Preaching Commentary Confrontation Most pastors don’t care for confrontation. Maybe, that could be said for most people. There are the rare few of us who thrive on the tension and drama that comes ...
In this excerpt, author David Zahl challenges the common belief that religion is “in decline.” He argues that while Westerners, particularly younger generations, may be distancing themselves from the ...
In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for ...
In this short excerpt, pastor and author Austin Fischer summarizes the late 19th century book Flatland as an analogy for the often-one-dimensional faith that exists our time: tIn 1884, an English sc...
Genesis 3:1-24, Isaiah 6:1-8, Genesis 50:15-21, John 8:1-11, Luke 15:11-32, Psalm 51:1-17
In Guilt and Grace , Swiss physician and Christian, Paul Tournier, writes… I cannot study this very serious problem of guilt with you without raising the very obvious and tragic fact that rel...
Deconstruction isn’t a trendy thing to do, but it is a trend that is happening at scale in our country and passing from person to person. Anecdotally, when I look up various hashtags on TikTok, th...
Revelation 21:1-2, 2 Peter 3:13, Titus 2:13, Romans 8:18, Isaiah 65:17, Matthew 6:10
Some people call religion the opiate of the people. Karl Marx had Christianity and our eschatological hope in mind when he said that. Some contend that pointing to the future as the Christian’s ultima...
In this short (and humorous) excerpt, author David Zahl shares a definition of the secular: Perhaps secular warrants its own explanation, though. My most immediate association comes from the belov...
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...
When we look for larger, broader, more sustainable analyses of evil, we find of course that the major worldviews have all had ways of addressing it. The Buddhist says that the present world is an illu...
An essential part of the teachings and directives of the great religious and philosophical thinkers the world over has been on the meaning of pain and suffering.
I once had the opportunity to speak briefly to a large Mormon audience at the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. I told them that I feel badly about the fact that we evangelicals often tell Mormons what th...
I grew up near Washington D.C. surrounded by politics…I helped with the campaign of a friend’s father as he ran for state office, watched our friendly county supervisor become a US congressman, and le...
The first important quarrel of this sort arose over the advancing by Copernicus of his theory that the earth, instead of being a flat plane and the center of the universe, was actually only one of a n...
Other major world religions are still centered in the same general geographic area from which they originated except for Christianity. Even more intriguing, the center of Christian growth continues to...
You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan relig...