Category: Culture

  • 9/11 — 20 years

    We were right to be angry at the great wrongs of 9/11, but at some point, rehearsing that anger year after year doesn’t move us toward justice, love, or the forgiveness Jesus commands of his followers. It moves us toward resentment, hostility, and bitterness, with all the trouble it brings (Heb. 12:15). We never knew how to mourn. We just…

  • 9/11

    It’s been 20 years. It was a fundamental change in our society. I was reminded of so much in a Netflix short series called “Turning Point.” The footage of the day… the phone calls recorded from people who knew they weren’t going to make it out of the towers that day… the phone calls from Flight 93… The wars that…

  • The love/hate relationship with social media

    How many times I’ve tried to quit social media… and failed. I take breaks. I look in less often… and yet, there it is. Do I stay engaged? There are times when it irritates the living daylights out of me because there is far too much lack of discernment about those I thought to be “Christian” and I am too…

  • Our serious lack of discipleship in one picture

    For every category of Christianity, it is the vast MINORITY who see their allegiance as a Christian as more important than being American. This is the great failure of discipleship in American Christianity.

  • Mark Driscoll, Jordan Peterson, and masculinity

    …in our efforts to define what it means to be a Christian man, we shouldn’t center our efforts on “masculinity” at all, but rather on understanding a person—a person who, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being…

  • A step back from the brink?

    This week was a whirlwind of activity with the SBC annual meeting in Nashville and a narrow “win” for the leadership of SBC going to the least offensive candidate. (He is actually a good man and I am familiar with his work in racial justice in the Mobile area.) It was a tense week watching conspiracy theories and bad information…

  • What are we creating in this culture of death?

    The state of Arizona is getting its gas chamber ready to execute people using hydrogen cyanide, the deadly gas used by the Nazis at Auschwitz and other extermination camps during the Holocaust. The Guardian reported last week that it had obtained documents revealing that Arizona’s department of corrections has spent more than $2,000 to purchase the ingredients to make cyanide…

  • There is history… and there is what we believe about history…

    However, to an unusual degree, evangelicals have remained oblivious to how their own stories map onto larger histories. It’s not that evangelicals disregard history entirely, but they tend to prefer their own versions of events. At a popular level, pseudo-historians have played fast and loose with historical evidence to spin fanciful tales of America’s Christian origins. Within academic circles, some…