If you are going to be pro-choice, at least don't cheer the idea-- at least long to make abortion "rare." Whatever your views on abortion, and whether you're Republican or Democrat, cheering is not the right response.

How should we assess this ever-present narrative of struggle? Is it good for American politics? Good for Christians? Good for the soul? Or are there dangers? Let me offer one observation, two appreciations, and three concerns.

The old Puritan colonies of New England drove out dissenters, true enough, and Christianity was as official as could be, and those places are now as burned over and secular as it gets in the United States.

The New Atheists, on the other hand, seemed to gain a boost by labeling all pious citizens as potentially dangerous fanatics. Optimism faded for a short while (notice the darker colors and military surplus style in fashion or the pre-2008 cynicism in both political parties).

“The travails of a handful of Trappist monks in Israel — or Dalit and tribal Christians in India, or Nigerian Christians menaced by the Boko Haram, or the 150,000 new Christian martyrs every year generally — simply have a hard time breaking through the media filter in the West"

Christians who had taken refuge in churches were burned to death as the buildings were locked and set on fire. Churches that remained had their crosses taken down and crescents put up in their place. All of this was part of a move to exterminate Christianity from the lands of the old Byzantine empire, to “liberate” Asia Minor from Christian influence and put it into the hands of Islam.

Although the conservative confessional Reformed world is unified under the North American and Presbyterian Reformed Council (totaling roughly 500,000 Christians), that body is itself divided into no less than 12 different denominations. These denominations profess the same basic doctrines and hold to the same confessional documents, they observe the sacraments in the same way and have the same form of church government, and they even worship in broadly similar forms, but due to various cultural or theological distinctives they cannot seem to join themselves together as one church.

Men…pray this…If this is the man I am to become, may I be given the grace to lift my robe and run, like the prodigal father, with vulnerability and without fear, into the brokenness of the world – even as the onlookers jeer.

There may be good reasons to reform or replace the Sinner's Prayer in evangelical "liturgical life." But we have to do better than theological snobbery or spiritual self-righteousness

Why should Christians bother reading literature at all? Because reading literature humanizes us -- in the best sense of the word. Literature helps us realize the image of God in us in ways that we cannot afford to miss. (By "literature," I am simply thinking of published works of imaginative writing in various genres, such as poetry, fiction and drama.)