Read Time: 10 minutes We live in a world dominated by artistic representations of reality, especially in the form of film. As such, it seems worthwhile to pick out and recommend a few of the best of those representations. Put more simply, we live in a culture whose thought life has been, and continues to be, greatly shaped by Hollywood and its movies. Whether or not this fairly young historical phenomenon has, on the whole, been good for society is... Read more
Read Time: 15 minutes As moral thought and action continue to corrode in America, the pressure to accept polyamorous relationships is mounting. Already 8 years ago, immediately after the passing of Obergefell vs. Hodges, law professors were entertaining the possibility of legalized polygamy. William Baude’s July 21, 2015 New York Times article is just one example of what many conservatives were warning about prior to the SCOTUS ruling on same-sex marriage. Once marriage is unmoored from any pre-political foundation, as... Read more
In the most celebrated teaching in all human history, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Christ said this: 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,4 so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 5 “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the... Read more
Read time: 8 minutes Is there a sin more subtle than the rest? A disposition which lies under the surface of so many evils? Something that acts as the catalyst for all other immoralities, yet which is exceedingly hard to discern, and to overcome? In Exodus 32, we are confronted with one of the greatest moral failures in the history of God’s people. It is a story which illuminates one of the most subtle of all human problems, the basis... Read more
Read time: 10 minutes When it comes to the movement of the Spirit of God, I am no skeptic. I just want to make that clear at the outset of this short reflection on what has been going on at Asbury Seminary in Kentucky. As someone who has experienced God move powerfully in his own life, to include sensately (via the senses), I never doubt that God can and does manifest Himself in experientially significant ways; not just in biblical times, but... Read more
Read Time: 15 minutes In the 1997 preface to his classic work on intellectuals and their infatuation with socialist states, Political Pilgrims, Paul Hollander sums up the bizarre love affair between Western intellectual elites and Marxist dictatorships: To this writer it did not cease to be deeply puzzling how and why so many Western intellectuals could lose, at certain periods of time, the capacity to differentiate, to note important distinctions between various social-political systems, countries, amounts of repression, corruption, social injustice,... Read more
Read time: 10 minutes Small group studies in American Evangelicalism usually revolve around one or two things: either a particular book of the Bible, or a “fill-in-the-blank” big-letter workbook that reads at about the 5th-grade level and has an accompanying video production by the local pastor. The first is useful. The second, in my opinion, needs to die, and die last year. There are, however, other alternatives to good, old-fashioned Bible studies–which, of course, must continue. Here is one suggestion... Read more
Reading time: 15-20 minutes Ezekiel 16 and 23 offer a terrifying account of what seems to be an inescapable dynamic of the human condition. This dynamic, which one theologian has called the law of “Fearful Symmetry,” is pervasive throughout time and culture. It is not relegated to a biblical past, but plays out repeatedly in human history. No individual has every fully avoided it. No culture has yet to escape its effects. Many have succumbed to it, their lives ending... Read more
Eduardo J. Echeverria Are We Together: A Roman Catholic Analyzes Evangelical Protestants Hobe Sound, Florida: Lectio Publishing, 2022. Pp. 206 Paper. $21.75 ISBN 978-1-943901-24-01 Eduardo Echeverria’s book, Are We Together: A Roman Catholic Analyzes Evangelical Protestants, is a careful and charitable response to some recent Evangelical works against Roman Catholicism. Echeverria, holds a Licentiate in Sacred Theology (University of St. Thomas, Rome) and PhD in Philosophy (Free University, Amsterdam), and is professor at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. The author... Read more
The following weeks will bring numerous commentaries on the killing of Tyre Nichols. It is not my intent to address the legal fine points of this criminal act. Neither is it my aim to comment on the politics of policing, nor even on the racial aspects of the attack (although this last point is tangentially related to that which follows). My focus, instead, will be on two contrasting, philosophical responses to this terrible event. These differing responses are very telling... Read more
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