Bill Pannell, a Black evangelical who pushed white evangelicals to recognize their captivity to the culture of American racism, died on October 11 at age 95. The evangelist and seminary professor argued that the Good News is all about reconciliation—between God and humanity, but also horizontally, between people—and Christians are called to the ministry of…
I first met the late William Pannell in 1993 in a hallway of Christianity Today. I was in my early 20s, just a year removed from graduating college. Dr. Pannell was visiting his old friend, former CT president Paul Robbins, and the pair was on a leisurely tour around the office. I remember being enthralled…
Jack Iker, a Texas bishop who took 48 congregations and 15,000 parishioners out of the Episcopal Church USA and helped start the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), died on October 5. He was 75. Iker was a conservative Anglo-Catholic who made common cause with evangelicals—whom he called “strange bedfellows”—in order to fight against liberal…
Years ago, I taught a Bible study that I knew would be controversial. I was a couple years into seminary, and my church asked me to join a team of teachers for the weekly women’s Bible study. We were going through Genesis, and I received the sign-up sheet after everyone else had already selected their…
In an animation landscape full of sequels, prequels, and remakes, The Wild Robot is a welcome respite. Based on Peter Brown’s eponymous 2016 novel and brought to the screen in painterly style, the film tells the story of a robot stranded on an island and forced to adapt to her woodland surroundings. Programmed to be…
Contemporary culture is brimming with exhortations to discipline. From Jordan Peterson’s runaway bestseller 12 Rules for Life to Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic to James Clear’s Atomic Habits, we have no shortage of guidance for embracing a life of order. And that guidance isn’t all bad; wisdom from many corners can deepen our understanding of how to live well. Psychologists,…
International Christian engineering nonprofit Water Mission usually responds to clean water crises overseas, like flooding in East Africa this year or the earthquake in Turkey last year. But when the South Carolina–based organization saw the extensive damage to Western North Carolina’s water infrastructure after the historic storm Helene, it decided to activate a rare disaster…
When Kori Koss heard that Donald Trump was coming back to Butler, she felt her stomach sink. It’s been less than three months since a would-be assassin’s gunshots narrowly missed the former president. The shooter killed one man, 50-year-old Corey Comperatore, and gravely injured two others. Koss lives down the road from the Butler Farm…
Questions of bishops stirred controversy in Costa Rica. Amid the joy of the convening General Conference of the Global Methodist Church as the new denomination ratified and modified the provisional decisions of its transitional leadership, the episcopacy emerged as the one issue that could rouse serious disagreement. Who would be in charge of the new…
In his 1996 novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, John Updike has a fictional Reformed Presbyterian minister feel his faith abandon him like an exhale, leaving his “habitual mental contortions decisively relaxed.” For this minister, the experience was one of relief, “an immense strain of justification” lifted “at a blow.” Unbelief, in this sense,…