Purity Through Food: How Religious Ideas Sell Diets
Eating based on what is "natural" offers little but sanctimony.
He is not at all alone in approaching food production through the romantic lenses of nature and the past. Combine that with basic puritanical fears of pleasure and the monotonic fallacy that if something is impure it must be totally avoided, and almost any popular dietary approach can be explained. Foods are either natural... Continue Reading
What Not to Say to Someone Who Has Been Hurt By Church
6 misguided responses to spiritual abuse.
One of the most effective ways to silence a victim is to fill them with a false sense of guilt. The victim is led to believe that talking is only going to make things worse, and whatever happens as a result is their fault. Certainly, exposing spiritual abuse can divide a congregation. But that’s not... Continue Reading
Fear and Faith
A review of Trillia Newbell's new book on "Finding the peace your heart craves"
One thing that many who are plagued by fear will like about this book is that Trillia uses the testimonies of others to God’s faithfulness in the midst of great personal trial. These testimonies don’t end all tied up in a fearless bow either. I think that Trillia wanted to really send the message that... Continue Reading
Hymns We Should Sing More Often: Hallelujah, Praise Jehovah, O My Soul
This is part of an intermittent series I’ve called “Hymns We Should Sing More Often.”
Psalm 146, from which this hymn, Hallelujah, Praise Jehovah, O My Soul, is taken, highlights the delightful and hopeful side of spiritual experience: God is to be praised because he is utterly trustworthy, faithful, powerful, compassionate, and just. The psalm begins and ends with “Hallelu Yah!” “Praise Jehovah!” The main body of the psalm encourages us... Continue Reading
Why Do Christians Worship on Sunday and Not Saturday?
Why do Christian meet and worship on Sunday?
They had made the change because it was on the first day of the week that Jesus Christ forever set that day apart from all the others by rising from the dead. From that point onwards Sunday became a memorial to the turning point in the history of redemption. The Sabbath day from the beginning... Continue Reading
Leaving Home: The Future of the Faith in England
Canterbury has sold its birthright; after planting the orthodox Gospel around the world has slid away from the Apostolic faith to a heterodox secularized shadow of that faith
In the last 40 years, what has happened instead, is that the Church of England turned its back on the Spirit and the Scriptures and gave herself to the new secularism. It has preferred egalitarianism to evangelism; it has chosen the struggle for gender parity to the struggle for the Gospel purity. The thought... Continue Reading
John Stonestreet on Restoration and Hope
One of Chuck Colson’s successors talks about God’s redemptive plan for the world
I feel like a lot of people who want to hold these, orthodoxy and orthopraxy, but they don’t realize the implications of orthodoxy for orthopraxy. It’s like these are two independently settled categories that we can think about separately. You’ve got to think about them together. … You say, “I’m in this cultural moment, what... Continue Reading
Under God: A Review of One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America
Kruse’s argument is that much of what we think of today as the fundamental institutions and ideologies of Christian America actually date to the 1950s
If you say that the particular forms of “Christian nationalism” date from the 1950s, fine – as Kruse says, the “ceremonies and slogans.” But to say, as Lehmann suggests, that the underlying ideology was novel in that era is absurd. To appreciate that, think about the inconceivably vast literature over the previous two hundred years... Continue Reading
ISIS Executes 35 Ethiopian Christians
Islamic State militants reiterate war against ‘nation of the cross’ in harrowing video
The grisly video bore the grim trademark of Islamic State (ISIS) footage in February that showed the beheadings of 21 Egyptian Christians on a Libyan beach. The Egyptian government ordered airstrikes against Islamic State targets in response. The new 29-minute video showed black-clad ISIS militants executing two groups of Ethiopian men identified as Christians in... Continue Reading
Smearing Sexual Orientation Change
Speakers at the conference were quite clear that change of sexual orientation for all meant no longer living under the control of sinful desires.
The point, which she apparently missed, is that Jesus extrapolated his position about limiting the number of partners in a sexual union to two based on the twoness of the sexes, “male and female,” which in turn establishes a male-female prerequisite as foundational. Jesus regarded the Genesis creation texts as essential for defining sexual ethics,... Continue Reading