False Hope in Advertising

A series of ads funded by eight atheist groups are being posted in the New York subway system.  The ads will show a blue sky with the words, “A million New Yorkers are good without God.  Are you?”  It seems that this sort of thing makes news (or at least, this blog) every year.  This time, the [...]

Read Full Post »

Not Knowing God

Every few months I receive a newsletter from my brothers and sisters at the L’Abri Fellowship in Southborough, MA.  In addition to current events and lecture schedules,  director Dick Keyes always begins with a brief essay.  For this autumn’s newsletter, Keyes, taking a cue from Paul’s encounter with the “unknown god” of Acts 17, reflects on three patterns [...]

Read Full Post »

Sympathy for the Agnostic

“It’s the economy, stupid.”
Whether or not you remember this popular campaign slogan from Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential bid,  17 years later, it would seem that the US economy still ranks in the top 3 stars that share the media limelight (global security and Michelle Obama’s wardrobe appear to be the other two).  Much of the economic [...]

Read Full Post »

RoTM: Churching, Part I

It seems that I and my e-friend Steve both dislike the phrase “doing chuch,” so I will coin an alternative for this post: “churching.”  For my money, churching is an unbelievably difficult topic to tackle, though I wonder how much of the difficulty is self-inflicted.  Must it be so complicated, so nuanced, so controversial?  I would answer a [...]

Read Full Post »

Book Review: The Shack, Part II

As promised in Part I, I hope to take a closer look at the theology of William P. Young’s The Shack.  As an opening remark, I do not believe Young set out to write a systematic theology, and he should not be chided for failing to do so.  Young is bringing to bear characteristics of [...]

Read Full Post »

Consuming Christ

Tyler Wigg-Stevenson has written a great article about the dangers of “marketing” Christianity.  It is well worth the read.  Check it out here.
(Thanks to our good friend Ben for spotting this one.)

Read Full Post »

Book Review: The Shack, Part I

In his preface to the 1961 edition of the The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis laments that his book is unbalanced.  Screwtape tells the one-sided tale of two demons seeking to keep an individual from God.  He wishes there could have also been written an account of angelic responses to the lies of the demons, but [...]

Read Full Post »

Harry Potter and the Resurrected Posts

The following is an edited combination of two posts I put up on my personal blog almost a year ago. After a conversation of sorts with a commenter on my Maher-ulous post, I thought these were germane to the discussion (tangentially, at least).

I’ll begin with a scene from a Simpsons episode:
Flanders:(reading softly to Rod and Todd)…And [...]

Read Full Post »

Seriously Maher-ulous, Part II

As promised, I wanted to continue exploring some of the issues brought about by the recent release of “Religulous,” starring Bill Maher. To be clear, the intention in my first post was really to bring up some of the issues that surface when we consider the premise of Maher’s film. I cannot review the film [...]

Read Full Post »

Seriously Maher-ulous, Part I

No doubt there will be (and have been) a flurry of people writing about Bill Maher’s new film, “Religulous” (e.g., J.P. Holding’s site). At the prompting of a friend, I figured I might as well join the fray. I have not seen this film, nor do I have any plans to do so. My best [...]

Read Full Post »