Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
One of Donald Trump's promises to the Evangelical community--and one which he's gotten much enthusiasm about in return--is his promise to repeal the so-called "Johnson Amendment," the provision in the tax code which prohibits 503(c)3 tax-exempt organisations--and that includes churches--from explicitly endorsing candidates for public office. I say "explicitly" because churches on both sides of …
Continue reading "The Perils of Repealing the Johnson Amendment"
One of the more baleful pieces that has recently appeared in the "Old Grey Lady" (and there are many) is their article on Bart Campolo and his decamping from Christianity to atheism. I am sure that some secular progressives have toasted each other (probably multiple times, with the predictable result for them) on this catch. …
Continue reading "If I Started the way @BartCampolo Did, I Wouldn't Believe in God Either"
Or, more precisely, the Virgin Birth: Andy Stanley, founder of North Point Ministries, a network of six congregations across the Atlanta metropolitan area attended by 30,000 worshipers a week, said in a message Dec. 3 that one of the challenging things about Christmas is the “unbelievable” nature of stories in the Bible describing Jesus’ miraculous …
Continue reading "@AndyStanley and his own "War on Christmas""
He's certainly in trouble: Now Moore himself, as the ERLC leader, is under attack from some of the religious right figures he criticized during the campaign... "There are a number of churches that I have heard of in the SBC, fairly large churches, that are going to withhold their funds from the ERLC," Harrell says, …
Continue reading "Russell Moore Loses His "No Win" Position"
In The Worse Plotting Against the Better, XLVIII, Philo Judaeus observes the following: On which account it seems to me that all men who are not utterly uneducated would choose to be mutilated and to become blind, and not to see what is not fitting to be seen, to become deaf and not to hear …
Continue reading "Avoiding Evil Just Isn't a Top Priority Any More"
Way back in 2003, Christianity Today ran an article that began like this: Elaine Pagels, the famous historian of early Christianity, once told a revealing story about the social world behind the scenes of high-powered biblical scholarship. As a young up-and-coming professor at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, she was invited …
Continue reading "Three Sheets to the Wind: Seminary Academics and Orthodoxy"
Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku lays it out: “I have concluded that we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence,” Kaku said, as quoted by the Geophilosophical Association of Anthropological and Cultural Studies. “To me it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped …
She's taken a stand, all right: On Sunday, Oct. 9, 2016, popular Bible teacher and speaker Beth Moore broke her silence on political issues and posted a series of tweets that sent waves through the evangelical community. Moore’s tweet-sized messages called out Christian leaders who have turned a blind eye to the plight of women …
Continue reading "The No-Win Position of @BethMooreLPM (and Others)"
Which is what some of it, at least, has done: A similar crisis has shaken the philosophical estate within the church. Before 1970 philosophy enjoyed an enviable prominence in the curriculum of Catholic colleges. This Neo-Scholastic philosophy was certainly structured around the perennial questions—Does God exist? What is virtue?—but it was an odd, manual Thomism …
Continue reading "When Catholic Academia Bails on Philosophy, We're All in Trouble"
We're pretty much in a war zone these days between police, black people and just about everyone else being the shooter or the shot. I find it hard to really say anything meaningful about it. One of the "spin-offs" of my PhD pursuits is riding the "city" bus. Actually we have a regional authority called …
Positive Infinity 