So much focus on striving to win always leaves me uneasy. If the last shall be first, I find myself wondering, how do you defend years of training to go for the gold? Most of us know what it means to want to be the best at school or in the office, or to get our way in relationships. These yearnings don’t generally bring out our most loving or generous selves.
Researchers are hosting a conference at Ohio State University in which they are announcing that they have shed more light on—or shrouded further in mystery, if you’ll pardon the pun—the possible authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. Carbon dating authorized by the Roman Catholic church in 1998 established it, for many, to be medieval in origin. New research, however, suggests that the shroud may have been vandalized and/or patched during medieval times, introducing cotton fibers that are not part of the original.
It’s a trend that we’ve noted previously as we’ve followed nonconservative evangelical groups and seen reports of this through the Pew Forum, but the Washington Post gave over part of its front page yesterday to put a new face on the changing landscape both for evangelicals and the Republican Party—that of Jonathan Merritt, 25, a Baptist preacher’s son who explains in an interview how he personally has experienced that change.
Andrew Brown posits that much of the acrimony in religious debate today is the result of people not taking online discourse seriously, and adds that the current schism may in fact be the result of how the Internet allows people to voice their opinions without the same filter that one generally applies to their face-to-face communications. Additionally, the same online tools that allow us to connect and see things we have in common also allow us to see what we have in opposition that we might not otherwise know.
’80s nostalgia is everywhere these days, but one American Baptist preacher has taken it to another level. Tripp Hudgins, the 37-year-old pastor of the Community Church of Wilmette near Chicago, was looking for a way to help boost summer attendance. So he created a sermon series in which he discusses about the spiritual themes that are woven into the films of John Hughes.
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Both men have proved to be geniuses at adapting religion to their times. Mr Graham took the barbed-wire fundamentalism of his youth and reshaped it for the post-war era of two-car garages and upward mobility. Mr Warren took post-war evangelicalism and reshaped it, yet again, for the world of suburban anomie and the search for meaning. This required entrepreneurial skills of a high order.
In the end, Jesus raises Peter up from the water (still without having calmed the storm) and climbs into the boat with the other disciples. It is only now that the wind drops and the sea is calm. In the boat, gathered around Jesus, there is calm and peace. Peter and the others have been saved from the storm, not through their own efforts and abilities or their skills as fishermen, but by the presence of the Son of God in their boat.
Back in the middle of the twentieth century a thin book was published by C.S. Lewis entitled Mere Christianity. The book was an attempt to
After a dispute arose among the followers of Christ in the city of Wichita as to which of them were first in the city, a combat by trivia was declared. Hilarity ensues?