Mourning miscarriage means acknowledging the particular life that’s been lost. You’re young. You can try again,” the phlebotomist says as he sticks a needle in my arm. He’s drawing blood for tests that will confirm what ultrasounds are already saying: I am miscarrying. I recognize the young man’s attempt to offer comfort and receive it…
Postliterate people still need God’s Word, and online Bible ventures have found eager listeners. Suppose you agree that ours is an increasingly postliterate age. The average person, including the average Christian, is reading less, and Christians of all ages, especially the young, lack the basics of biblical literacy. Is that all there is to say?…
Unperturbed by debates over the book’s relationship to modern thought, she helps us appreciate its marriage of literary structure and theological claims. In her latest book, Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson insists that modern readers have largely misunderstood the literary and theological significance of the Bible. Among the most salient causes of this misunderstanding, she argues,…
Amid the continued declines, Southern Baptists are celebrating back-to-back years of growth in worship attendance and baptism. Despite years of record-setting declines shrinking the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) to its lowest membership in nearly half a century, Southern Baptists have begun to see some signs of life within their 46,906 churches. Worship attendance, small group…
Our apologetics must evolve to engage with the new cultural mood of the next generations. For years now, scholars have announced the death of postmodernism. After decades of dominance as a cultural mood, the famously cynical and relativistic intellectual stance is finally out. In its place, another ideological outlook is taking hold—as those of us…
After this week’s UMC votes on LGBTQ issues, African Methodists should join American conservatives in the new Global Methodist denomination. That was fast. In the first General Conference since the most conservative congregations disaffiliated, the United Methodist Church liberalized its teachings on marriage, sexuality, and the ordination of LGBTQ clergy. In other mainline denominations, like…
An ancient codex, containing perhaps the earliest complete versions of Jonah and 1 Peter, goes up for auction in June. Will it disappear? One of the oldest books in existence, which contains what is perhaps the oldest complete versions of Jonah and 1 Peter, is going up for auction in June. The sale of the…
The Dallas Mavericks were intended to be the first Christian team in the NBA. At the time, 1980 did not seem like a great year to launch a new professional sports franchise. Interest rates were high. The Iranian hostage crisis dominated national attention. A presidential election loomed. There was a general feeling of pessimism and…
Ethan Hawke has made a movie as scandalous as one of the writer’s short stories. Why not write something that “a lot, a lot, of people like?” Regina O’Connor asks her daughter, the writer Flannery O’Connor, in the middle of the new biopic Wildcat. The same question might be put to the film itself. It’s…
In Reversing Entropy, the 95-year-old poet looks lovingly at creation. Luci Shaw is a legend in Christian literary circles. Her many volumes of poetry—named for rivers and clay, the color green, the glint of seaglass—speak to the beauty of creation and the generosity of the Creator. She has written on faith and art, the Christian…
