Last week, pastor Trevin Wax posted an interesting blog entry about the way serious preaching demands serious presentation. Specifically, Wax is watching a trend of churches “focusing on the centrality of the Word in worship,” and noting that it clashes with the contemporary . . . . Continue Reading »
“Unfortunately our recent study of the highly popular Earth-being religion Major League Baseball suggests that the planet’s dominant speciesa semi-gelatinous, endoskeletal, sexually-reproducing bipedis not sufficiently evolved for consciousness absorption,” writes . . . . Continue Reading »
Last week Insider Higher Education offered a helpful summary of a new study that dug down a bit into the culture of higher education to see how conservative students survive and thrive . The study found that students at an elite liberal arts college tended to have positive experiences, even though . . . . Continue Reading »
Today in “On the Square,” Joseph Bottum reflects on the Bible’s hard sayings, which are “too many, too hard, to be entirely exegeted away in historical criticism, or eased with gentler passages in antidote, or shrugged off as the overstatement of prophetic rhetoric,” . . . . Continue Reading »
Daniel Luban argued last week in the Tablet webzine that the old anti-Semitism has transmogrified into Islamophobia:...many of the tropes of classic anti-Semitism have been revived and given new force on the American right. Once again jingoistic politicians and commentators posit a religious . . . . Continue Reading »
Well, I couldn’t get away to Wyoming without casting a little light on a revealing NYT. On one hand, it castigates critics of Donald Berwick—for, among other things, accusing him of promoting rationing for the USA. It’s all fear mongering, don’t you know. . . . . Continue Reading »
In addition to a “royal priesthood” and a “holy nation,” the King James Bible speaks of Christians in 1 Peter 2:9 as a “peculiar people.” Modern translations dispense with the term, but it seems that to at least one sociologist, some Bible-belt Christians . . . . Continue Reading »
Robert Reilly’s new book The Closing of the Muslim Mind rehashes the Muslim turn away from Greek philosophy with al-Ghazali, and argues that doctrinal irrationality is the source of all the problems in the Muslim world. There is of course something to this argument, and al-Ghazali’s . . . . Continue Reading »