“In recent months, campuses across the country have exploded with such conflicts, with Yale and the University of Missouri prominent among them. Then as now, questions about race, gender, and sexual orientation were at the forefront.”   In some ways it is a mixed blessing for a book to be timely—and not just in the... Continue Reading

It’s becoming harder for us to focus on reading a whole article, much less an entire book. But we don’t have to give in to that. We need to exercise our brains to keep the firing paths moving for endurance in our attention spans and capacity to think deeply. Just like a constant diet of... Continue Reading

“But if we do not take sufficient time to take the roof off, the twentieth-century man will not comprehend what we are trying to communicate, either what his death is caused by, or the solution.  We must never forget that the first part of the gospel is not ‘Accept Christ as Savior’ but ‘God is... Continue Reading

I hope that Canon Press and the authors involved will be more careful in the future with their citations. I also think it would have been wise for Canon to have kept to their original statement on the plagiarism in A Justice Primer. It was clear and concise. I don’t believe their current statement has done... Continue Reading

While these themes have taken center stage at particular periods in the church’s history, that is only the tip of the iceberg. They are perennially relevant because underneath them lies the most fundamental question of all: Who is the God whom we come to know in Jesus Christ (John 17:3)? What is he really like,... Continue Reading

Like everyone else, I thought that the celebrity writers of these bright, flowery studies were biblical. They certainly contained some familiar Bible verses and talked about God – and sometimes Jesus. But the narrative almost always seemed to point to the author, and her life, and her countless anecdotes about her kids, her husband, her... Continue Reading

We live in a time when local churches come and go.  Sometimes a person gets a “vision” to plant a church, so they just go ahead and do it with very little planning or purposely formed biblical foundations.  On the other hand, some local churches that have been around for a while simply go on... Continue Reading

“The 1559 Institutio is great theology, and it is uncanny how often, as we read and re-read it, we come across passages that seem to speak directly across the centuries to our own hearts and our own present-day theological debates. You never seem to get to the book’s bottom; it keeps opening up as a... Continue Reading

“But we probably all know Christians who are anything but gentle and respectful, people who for one reason or another are incurable smart alecks or have a mountain-sized ego that devours the oxygen in any room they enter. Little though they realize it, the more they open their mouths, the more they discredit their cause.... Continue Reading

“Best books” lists are unavoidably idiosyncratic—hence an effort at recommending “significant” books for pastors. This may well mean a pastor should read them, but it certainly means a pastor should, at least, be aware of them. My criteria remain the same: (a) I try to include a range of genres, since different books contribute different... Continue Reading