Books for children and teenagers are written, packaged, and sold by adults. It follows from this that the emotional depictions they contain come to young people with a kind of adult imprimatur. As a school librarian in Idaho wrote to her colleagues in my defense: “You are naïve if you think young people can read... Continue Reading

Seventh, do you need to name a name or can you simply critique the problematic concept?  My rule of thumb when it comes to fellow Christians is generally to critique the concept and not name any individual.   This is particularly important when it comes, for example, to other ministers of good standing.  My goal is... Continue Reading

Such a conception had to lead to an essentially optimistic view of culture and the world. Not that Kuyper himself lost sight of sin and its awful consequences for the human race and the cosmos. He deeply believed in the antithesis and thus in the fundamental difference between common and particular grace. The same cannot... Continue Reading

I cannot tell you what challenges your precious one might have — just as I cannot tell you what challenges anybody’s child will have, “special needs” or not. One aspect of your child’s life just happens to be detectable by prenatal medical technology. But prenatal testing cannot tell you who your child will be, anymore... Continue Reading

It is no coincidence in a society where we imagine ourselves mostly as victims of social or biological forces, in a culture increasingly illiterate in the language of guilt, sin, and personal responsibility, that Christus Victor is winning the day in the Christian world. To be clear: I am not suggesting that champions of Christus... Continue Reading

Some presentations of transformationalism seem to breathe more than a little of this over-realized eschatology. Christ is Lord over all right now and when Christ returns, all things will be reconciled, every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Christ is Lord but not until then. So, as such discussions often do, this one... Continue Reading

Healthy churches are messy. It’s easy to look in from the outside and claim, “Half that church is immature!” But such disdain could be misguided. While a state of perpetual immaturity is a recipe for disaster, a constant movement of many immature people being discipled is exactly what Jesus commanded us to do.   There... Continue Reading

The good news is that self-control can be developed. Just as exercising can strengthen muscles, engaging in self-control improves the ability to delay gratification in the future. We can help our elected leaders improve their self-control. When our leaders show spending restraint, however small, we can thank them. If politicians begin to believe they will... Continue Reading

But while Jobs presents a fascinating story of how Jobs overcomes corporate backbiting and channels his own tendency toward obsession to build arguably the most innovative company of the last decade, it veers into corporate hagiography, suggesting that Jobs’ ruthlessness is somehow an asset. As if he couldn’t have accomplished what he did without burning loyal friends... Continue Reading

If all Scripture is breathed out by God (2 Tim. 3:16), then there is a unity to be found across the pages of the Bible. Without minimizing the differences of genre and human authorship, we should nevertheless approach the Bible expecting theological distinctives and apparent discrepancies to be fully reconcilable. The unity of Scripture also... Continue Reading