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Honoring and Leaving
The challenge each of these faced in their deconstruction—and what we may face—is walking the tightrope between becoming our own person and honoring our past. In The Homeless Mind , sociologist P... -
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A Western upbringing tends to stress questioning authority, which is always asking why, why, why. -
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Cultures like ours encourage us to consider all aspects of our lives in terms of self-interest. How do we cultivate a life marked by God’s love – a love that is always directed toward the needs of oth... -
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Thinking Biblically about Work and Ownership
In modern Western culture we place a high value on work, which is fine, but one of the philosophical assumptions that can come with such values is that we assume that we own what we earn or buy. From ... -
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Bowing Down to Progress
We are taught, often by the tone of voice of the media and the politicians rather than by explicit argument, to bow down before…progress. It is unstoppable. Who wants to be left behind, to be behind t... -
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Taking Seriously the Possibility of God’s Guidance
Richard Attenborough’s movie Gandhi has a scene set in South Africa where the young Indian lawyer and a white clergyman are walking together on a boardwalk, contrary to South African law at the time. ... -
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Western Christianity has long taught that we are changed by what we believe and what we choose—that is, by the human will responding to God. Attachment to God would functionally replace the will as th... -
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It Goes Without Saying
In a culture, the most important things usually go without being said. We Westerners don’t talk all the time about being individualists or about the importance of efficiency or why we prefer youth ove... -
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"Pure" Christianity and A Slave-Based Christianity
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... -
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In God’s Image
Pop psychology is wrong when it tells you to look inside yourself and find your value. The magazines are wrong when they suggest you are only as good as you are thin, muscular, pimple-free, or perfume... -
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“Respecting” Religion by Making it Private
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... -
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We are a society that despises lack. We despise weakness and need and insufficiency. We turn the other way and pretend to be watching oncoming traffic when the red light halts us and the beggar reache... -
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The Church Losing its Place as the Center of Attention
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... -
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Doubt over Faith?
Have you ever noticed that the phrases in our culture favor doubt over faith? The famed missionary and theologian Lesslie Newbigin pointed this out when we speak of “Honest doubts” and “blind faith”. ... -
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True Freedom
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger... -
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When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.” For more,... -
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Culture is Like Gravity
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. ... -
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The suffering addressed in 1 Peter is not random misfortune but the social cost of a new identity that challenges prevailing cultural norms. -
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Consider the Culture
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... -
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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... -
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One of the gravest dangers to the Christian faith
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... -
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Culture is like an Iceberg
Edward T. Hall likened the effects of culture to an iceberg. Some aspects of a culture are overt, in clear view above the waterline, so to speak. But most are hidden deep below the surface, forming th... -
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Christians Can Cultivate Culture
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... -
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Music: Yesterday & Today
These days, music is everywhere. It’s on television and film, elevators and restaurants, public bathrooms and dentist offices. It’s in our cars and on our phones. With just a few taps to our screens, ... -
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Historically the West has tended to throw its chief emphasis upon doing and the East upon being. . . . Were human nature perfect there would be no discrepancy between being and doing. The unfallen man... -
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What has Jerusalem to do with Athens, the Church with the Academy, the Christian with the heretic?” -
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Can the west be converted? -
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A People Distracted by Distraction
From drugs and alcohol to TV and workaholism, we are increasingly a society that fulfills T.S. Eliot’s description of a people “distracted by distraction.” There is hardly a public menace we can name ... -
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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? -
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Those who enjoy bemoaning their fate must acknowledge that on average they can do so for far longer and in far greater comfort than ever before.
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