I recently rediscovered a lecture by Brian Mclaren on The Four Historic Models for Church/State Interaction, and realized that (a) they needed one word formal labels, and (b) there is one more. So here they are people. Theocracy – Religious power is supreme and eclipses government...
My son is only 10 years old right now, but I’ve already started thinking about what i will tell him and his sisters as they get interested in the opposite sex and marriage. Here’s a list. If at all possible, wait until after you’ve finished...
Having returned from the Annual Far West Conference of the Evangelical Theological Society, I have some reflections on some best practices, some of which were glaringly missing from this conference. I also have to say that last year’s Rethinking Hell Conference was run better, and...
Few things are as influential as positive testimonies, be they for products, or for faith. The practice of telling the story of how you came to faith, a.k.a. the personal testimony, has waned of late in many churches, in no small part because either people are...
There’s been a lot of ballyhoo about the liberties taken by director Darren Aranofsky in his new film Noah. As an evangelical myself, I wondered how I would like the film. I’m really not into boycotting films, but more into reflecting on them. Here are...
One of the most interesting of epistemological arts is the art of debate. While we all like a good fight, we also like a fair fight, and those of us who are more interested in truth than victory like a civil debate rather than a...
I’ve had my ‘blues patch’ beard for almost a decade now, and even though it’s more common and popular now, many of my Christian friends ask why I keep such a beard, and even my wife wishes I would remove it so that I could...
One of my favorite atheist podcasts is from The Thinking Atheist. Seth, the proprietor of TA, is a former Christian who is now an outspoken atheist apologist. He is both thoughtful as well as, at times, maddeningly blind to his lapses into some of the...
