J.D. Greear serves currently as president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He pastors a “megachurch” in North Carolina and strikes some people as young and hip. While he can’t be blamed if people impose that stereotype on him, I will make the case briefly, in this post, that he feeds a frat-boy stereotype of himself,…
Roland Barthes was one of the French grandfathers of postmodernism. He wrote Mythologies in the 1950s. In that text he argued that myth was a language that made assumptions feel natural in people’s minds. Analyzing everything from detergent commercials to staged wrestling matches, he sought to understand how everyday symbols drove home political beliefs and…
In October 2019, while I was on mission in El Salvador, a middle-aged woman came to me and shared a message. She said that she’d prayed about me. We hadn’t met but she had listened to a talk I gave in Panama. She told me that during her prayers she felt a divine message and…
With all the talk about the coronavirus, now would be a good time to call Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron to mind. It was set in Florence during the famous outbreak of the bubonic plague. Though Boccaccio wrote in the 1370s, history shows that the plague did indeed break out in Florence in the middle of the…
On his way to be crucified, Jesus makes an eloquent statement to women who weep for Him. He tells the women not to weep for Jesus’s crucifixion, but rather for themselves and their own children. He says a day will come when everyone will regret ever having lived at all, because the judgment from God…
Continue readingStop justifying your complicity with evil by saying you’re in no position to act
The tension within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) resembles a conflict that we see in many other Christian denominations. In reading a The Thirty Years’ War by Geoffrey Parker I am reminded about how complex, multilateral, and turbulent social relations can become when a society divides over questions of ecclesiology. In the case of the…
This article seems to be running on a lot of right-wing websites such as the Drudge Report: /https://www.peakprosperity.com/next-comes-the-turbulent-twenties/ In this Stockman, a veteran of the Ronald Reagan administration, talks about the problem of onerous debt and what he predicts will be a decade of painful contraction and economic crisis. His economic analysis cannot be dismissed.…
Continue readingDavid Stockman’s vision of the Turbulent Twenties: What to do with the church?
I have heard people talk about a “post-Christian” world but it would be more appropriate to talk about a post-conservative world. Despite the many problems with the Christian churches, which I have sought to catalogue, the word “Christian” is so ancient and meaningful that it has no “brand” to tarnish. It is not a label,…
This story came across my transom: https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/grammy/recording-academy-fires-deborah-dugan/ar-BB10EOP8?ocid=spartandhp Sometimes you see across the political spectrum the same types of dirty deals and nastiness.
Continue readingI can feel for this liberal woman and how she was fired!
Is today’s time like Luther’s? Yes, absolutely.As Jeff Dornik discussed with me in yesterday’s interview, we cannot underestimate the significance of the religious upheaval we are witnessing right now. The USA was a Christian bastion for hundreds of years, the home base for people like Billy Graham and other world-famous evangelists. But the American churches…
Continue readingLuther, World War I, and the State of American Churches Today
