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Living at Crossroads

The “unbearable tension” of living at the crossroads…

Should we fit in?  Should we hunker down? Should we retreat?  Should we engage?  How should Christians respond to the challenges of living in a post-Christian culture?  The answers to these questions will be decisive as

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Stephen McAlpine

The barbarians and Christian exile (Stage Two)…

The barbarians “have already been governing us for quite some time.”  That’s one of the lessons that Alasdair MacIntyre has tried to teach us—a lesson that for some Christians has been slowly sinking in during the 34 years since

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iPod--Brent Laytham

It’s showtime, 24/7…

Boredom is the all-encompassing name we give our discontent in this late modern age.  Boredom gained prominence as a social condition in the 18th century when the word was invented, according to Patricia Meyer Spacks, author of Boredom:

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Remembering the Christian Past

Bearing witness to the one true God in a secular age…

The secular assault on the Christianity is, in essence, a project of banishing Christian practice to the private lives of believers.  You can keep your Christianity if you reduce it to ideas, feelings, and experiences.

But the ferocity of

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Polycarp

No God but God: The martyrdom of Polycarp

The life and death of Polycarp reminds us of Hebrews 11:35:  “Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life.”  Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, would not have been burned at

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Os Guinness--Renaissance

How the Church can learn an important lesson from the Vietnam War…

“If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist” is a taken-for-granted axiom of our age.  It is part of everyday thinking as well as a key component in medical and other forms of research.  It has played an

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N. D. Wilson

Cool-shaming – how people become our idols of choice…

Shame is a powerful motivator—one of the most powerful!  It hurts to feel inadequate, to feel stupid, to be counted among the uncool.

 

Most people are willing to pay a significant price—sometimes an enormous price—to avoid being an

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Flannery O'Connor

Sentimental Christians, a brood of wingless chickens…

What is the chief end of God?  The “chief end of God is to glorify us and to be useful to us indefinitely.”  This inversion of the opening line of the Westminster Confession is theologian Leander Keck’s way …

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J. Budziszewski

Evangelizing neo-pagans

The Church has never before had the task of evangelizing neo-pagans.  The new pagans are very different from their earlier counterparts, the ones faced by the early Christians.  Evangelization “this time will not be the same” … “nothing

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D F Wallace

A secular sermon on the folly of worshiping false gods…

Commencement speakers at secular colleges don’t usually deliver sermons.  But sometimes they do, even though they call them “commencement addresses” and they don’t cite scripture.  What these rare individuals do—along with a few poets, musicians, novelists, film makers

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