Thanksgiving Day, presently celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November, has been an annual tradition in the United States since 1863. It did not become a federal holiday until 1941. Thanksgiving was historically a religious observation to give thanks to God, but is now primarily identified as a . . . . Continue Reading »
So Joe posted a link to the new Manhattan Declaration which came out late last week, and in the comments it came out that I agree with the morals of the document but think this documents and others like it obscure the Gospel. Collin, my co-blogger here at Evangel, didn’t see what I meant . . . . Continue Reading »
From the letter of Methetes to Diognetus, c. 170 AD:For Christians are not distinguished from the rest of mankind either in locality or in speech or in customs. For they dwell not somewhere in cities of their own, neither do they use some different language, nor practice an extraordinary kind of . . . . Continue Reading »
Those who want to use this creed as the basis for their concession speech have to grasp first that the creed was not the means by which the universal and apostolic church all held hands and sang the Greek version of “Kumbaya”. It was the means by which the church was separating itself from egregious error. Continue Reading »
The Gospel is there so that death doesn’t swallow us up while we are creating environments that expand imagination, unleash creativity, and maximize the creative potential in every individual and organization. Continue Reading »
The transcript of my interview with Benjamin Wiker (who wrote Ten Books that Screwed Up the World) of To the Source is up. We talk about my book The End of Secularism.Here’s a clip where I answer Wiker’s question as to whether I am calling Christians to be anti-secular . . . . Continue Reading »
Exploration into God is exploration into darkness, into the heart of darkness. Yes, to be sure, God is light. He is the light by which all light is light. In the words of the Psalm, “In your light we see light.” Yet great mystics of the Christian tradition speak of the darkness in which the light is known, a darkness inextricably connected to the cross. At the heart of darkness the hope of the world is dying on a cross, and the longest stride of soul is to see in this a strange glory. In John’s Gospel, the cross is the bridge from the first Passover on the way out of Egypt to the new Passover into glory. In his first chapter he writes, “We have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.” The cross is not the eclipse of that glory but its shining forth, its epiphany. In John’s account, the death of Jesus is placed on the afternoon of the fourteenth day of the month of Nisan, precisely the time when the Passover lambs were offered up in the temple in Jerusalem. Lest anyone miss the point, John draws the parallel unmistakably. The legs of Jesus are not broken, the soldier pierces his side and John writes, “For these things took place that the scripture might be fulfilled, ‘Not a bone of him shall be broken.’ And again another scripture says, ‘They shall look on him whom they have pierced.’” In the book of Exodus, God commands that no bone of the paschal lamb is to be broken. Then there is this magnificent passage from the prophet Zechariah: “And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of compassion and supplication, so that, when they look on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn.” Continue Reading »
A culture must believe in its own enculturating responsibility and mission. This a post-Christian Europe cannot . . . . Continue Reading »
Late one night, a young scholar at Cambridge named Michael Ward reads “The Planets,” a minor poem by C.S. Lewis. In it he encounters a curious phrase about the influence of Jupiter: winter passed / And guilt forgiv’n. This, he notices, is exactly what happens in one of Lewis’s most . . . . Continue Reading »
Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher by peter j. stanlis isi, 350 pages, $28 Poor Robert Frost. Nearly half a century after his death, he is still suffering at the hands of both friends and enemies. Frost brought much of this problem on himself when he selected a troubled young . . . . Continue Reading »
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