Responding to Intolerance: Life Transformation
Increasingly we find ourselves in an America that doesn’t share our Christian beliefs.[1] In fact, it doesn’t simply not share them; it refuses even to tolerate them. The Obergefell decision has recently held that the Fourteenth Amendment protects so-called same-sex marriage rights, further pitting sexual freedom against religious freedom. And now courts jail those who refuse to issue marriage licenses, while also finding Christian...
Fighting on the Wrong Ground: Epistemological Missteps
I realized I was getting nowhere with this guy. It was my first year of youth ministry and one of my students, sly grin and all, had just asked how I knew the Bible was true. I tried to explain that prophecies have been fulfilled, lives have been changed, science has never proven the Bible wrong, and, like G.K. Chesterton I found that the Bible explained everything in my experience so well as to be inescapably true. However, my...
Rhythm’s ‘Rite’
This week marks the centennial of a famous riot in Paris on May 29, 1913. Was the cause of this riot political unrest, governmental abuses, or class warfare? No. It was a ballet! Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, The Rite of Spring, premiered in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, literally igniting a physical riot in the crowd, as well as an aesthetic riot in the twentieth century music world. How could a ballet have had such tremendous and...
Saving Schaeffer
On a shelf in the library archives of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary is a box. Inside is an aging, well-worn Bible. Finding a Bible in a library is nothing special—but this one is. It, along with thousands of letters, cassette tapes, and videos comprise the Francis Schaeffer literary estate. While many Christians aren’t familiar with his books, many have heard his name. Some have even seen pictures of this unique man...
A Twenty-first Century Reformation?
Every year a new round of publications on the Protestant Reformation checker the pages of academic catalogs around this time. While the arguments and approaches of these books differ, they all implicitly point to the same conclusion: the Reformation’s significance to Christianity is enduring and will continue to be the subject of conversation going forward. Baptists are frequently dismissed as not being historically or theologically...
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