“Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.” This admonition from St. Silouan is appropriate for Good Friday, when most of Christendom commemorates Christ’s descent into hell, where he shatters its captives’ chains. Many modern Western theologians have abandoned this teaching, but even if you reject it you are still, if you are a Christian, …
Some of you may like my latest essay at Image, about the 21 young men murdered by ISIS in Libya. Here’s an excerpt: These stories are now fantasy to us, or nearly so. Abraham holds the knife to Isaac’s throat, Jacob wrestles a holy messenger, David fells Goliath—the action rises and falls in an old …
Related to my previous post, I have an essay at Good Letters digging into the hypocrisy of evangelicals, as represented by the American Family Association, who simultaneously support the Drug War while demanding that we reject child refugees from that war. Here’s an excerpt: We sponsor both sides of this war; we constitute the primary …
I don’t think they love their children any less than I love my own, which tells me something about what their lives must be like, to send their babies away. Their children stream northward in droves—as many as 60,000 this year—and we don’t want them. We don’t want their skin lesions and their hungry bellies, …
“I’m sorry I shot you in the face with my Nerf gun. Do you forgive me?” My son knows he is supposed to ask for forgiveness, just as his brother knows that sooner or later he will be expected to say yes. He knows to say it because he knows he is supposed to forgive. …
Here’s an excerpt from my Christmas Eve post over at Good Letters: When I read about the boy hiding under his bed, first inviting the world he knew to watch him die, then hiding from it in that darkened place, I thought about the cave where a savior was born. I thought as well about …
This is not a comment about the reasoning of a Slate essayist, who wrote recently that the white Santa is outdated. This is not a comment about the Fox News talking head who took umbrage, asserting that not only Santa, but also Jesus, is white. This is not a comment about the predictable crowds who …
I’ve been wrestling for weeks with how to be at peace with fellow Christians who also happen to be harmfully heretical (and popular) teachers. On the one hand, we’re all supposed to love one another and get along. On the other hand, love doesn’t dictate that we pretend a donkey is a unicorn, at least …
Some of you might like my meditation on what Good Friday means to the parent of a dead child. Here’s an excerpt: “It is a great mystery to me, how God can know what it means to be forsaken, and because he is three-in-one, know also how it is to look on your dying child, …
Preach and heal. This is what Christ asked of his apostles, before sending them out in pairs: “And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. Freely you have received, freely give.” (Matt. 10:7-8) Churches struggle to conjoin them. …
The challenge when debating a liberal Christian is that he is bound by neither Scripture nor tradition but sentiment. He is therefore free to embrace both sin and sinner, and thereby appear more loving, more magnanimous, than his opponents. This magnanimity carries a subtle condescension, as in the first sentence of Dave Barnhart’s recent essay, …
A reasonable response to the accusation that the evangelical mind is insufficiently expansive is to ask to what dimensions its critics would like to see it expanded. That question springs to the lips when considering Biblical scholar Peter Enns’s contention that evangelical minds are not only confined, but are required to remain in confinement. “The …
Look, it’s not like The Hobbit is Holy Scripture. It’s not even, last I checked, part of the Apocrypha. It seems to me that the standard for judging Peter Jackson’s film rendition, then, ought to be whether it succeeds as art, rather than its faithfulness to Tolkien’s book. If we view the film as an …
This is not one of those reflections on the death of Christopher Hitchens, in which the writer labors to bolt his meager little meteor to that man’s literary supernova. I’ve read enough of those to make me retch, if not from their insipid attempts to rival his prose, then from their shameless me-and-Hitch reveries (“Once …
When we don’t think we can control some things we take charge of what we can. This is why the functionary fastidiously maintains a constant distance between his stapler and his tape dispenser, and why the abused child has a ritual for pajamas and tooth-brushing and curling up tight that he enacts like the body’s …
The AP headline is certainly startling: “41% OF NON-CHRISTIAN AF CADETS CITE PROSELYTIZING” My goodness, the reader is invited to think. What’s going on in Colorado Springs? Are little bands of dogmatists policing the halls like a pro-Jesus Taliban, seeking out bearers of Christopher Hitchens books and wearers of Linkin Park t-shirts to press against …
I suspect the reality about American religious knowledge is actually better and worse than the results indicate. The internet is crackling with a minor fire about the results of a Pew survey which, as many news outlets put it, indicates that atheists know more about religion than Christians. A quick sampling of blogs enshrined to …
One of G.K. Chesterton’s arguments in Everlasting Man is that the ancient pagans never really revered their petty gods and spirits and magical tree stumps nearly as much as the modern humanist, overflowing with tolerance and reverence for any belief system that distinguishes itself by not being Christian, imagines they did. They knew there was …
Maybe instead of pouring all this energy into haggling over claims in watered-down, non-primary source, lowest-common-denominator, utterly de-contextualized, ponderous textbooks, we ought to try harder to get kids to read more, and read more of what matters. Does anyone really think that one sentence about Cesar Chavez or Samuel Gompers is going to be the clincher between …
Caleb is now ten. He’s a “ten-ager,” as he likes to say. The boys come to work with me on their birthdays. I don’t know what they’ll do once I’m a world-famous author who writes full-time for a living. Perhaps sit in a corner in my little barn office and stare at the back of …
I’m pretty sure that somewhere in the unofficial New Yorker film critic handbook there’s a rule that goes something like this: If Christian faith is central to a film, don’t be afraid to stoop to name-calling and character assassination. Thus it wasn’t surprising to see in what manner David Denby unleashes his ire on The …
“There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books . . . This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. …
If this really is “…the best example of violation of the separation of church and state in this country,” then I think we’re all going to be just fine. And I have trouble seeing how a coded Christian verse on a rifle sight, while odd, is “literally pushing fundamentalist Christianity at the point of a gun.” …
Believing, as Pat Robertson does, that the suffering of those you despise is inflicted by a god on your side, and that the suffering of those you pity is the result of a devil’s curse, seems to come awfully close to paganism. Which is ironic, because the source of Robertson’s conclusion about the Haitian curse …
The thing is, I despised the happy sappy Jesus talk before I became a Christian, and I still do. You know the lingo: My personal relationship with Jesus will see me through any storm; Jesus is bigger than any of my problems; No matter what the world throws at me, Jesus will see me through… …
This news from the BBC, about a rise in the number of pagan winter solstice celebrants in the UK, is disturbing. How could people raised in the Christian West miss the point that Christmas is about shopping until your debt rivals that of a Wall Street bank, gorging yourself for a month straight, salivating over car and …
My family and I were on vacation, and so I missed the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth. I mean, July 10th happened where we were, it’s just that he wasn’t on my mind. I used to be a Calvinist. Many people I love are Calvinists. Others worship in churches that subtly advocate Calvin’s stern predestinationism, though …
Let me see if I’ve got this straight. We don’t want Obama to speak at Notre Dame, because we don’t want the Church associated with his support for abortion. So we’re outraged about that. But we do want him to give a speech in front of a plaque representing Jesus, and so we’re outraged about …
I couldn’t believe, when I first read it, that Harvard’s chaplain is an atheist. Then I felt stupid for being surprised. That die was likely cast when Harvard’s overseers struck Christo et Ecclesiae from its place surrounding Veritas on the university’s seal. What need Christ and Church, after all, when we can have unadulterated truth? Somewhere in …
Though I expected Michael Lewis’s Blind Side to do for football what his Moneyball did for baseball, I found my stomach churning as I read the story of Michael Oher, a black child neglected for years in the slums and streets of Memphis, until happenstance brought him to the doorstep of the exclusive, largely white, …