In a recent column published in the magazine The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier criticized President Obama for the kind of language the president uses when he discusses Islam. Wieseltier makes no secret of his own commitment to a secularist outlook when he refers to “Obama’s creepy habit of addressing Muslims in religious terms.” What Mr. […]
Someone recently talked about what are seen these days as the failures of the kind of liberation theology that got much attention in the 1970s and ’80s. I agreed with many of the criticisms. But I balked a bit at the suggestion that the Latin American liberation theologians simply superimposed a “political ideology” on Christianity. That certainly...
Some of my friends in at least three Reformed/Presbyterian denominations are upset with me because of previous my blog postings on the Belhar Confession. In a couple of cases, local ecclesiastical bodies are voting right around now whether to validate national decisions to add Belhar to their books of confessional documents. I have said in the past that I...
I have been reading materials from some of the more conservative Reformed groups about creation and evolution. In one denomination, a group of scholars—several of them in the natural sciences—are attempting to have a calm web-based discussion about some of the issues that bear on faith and science, and their denominational constituency is trying to shut the...
Shortly after coming home from one of our trips to mainland China, I read a report by an ecumenical group about economic issues. It featured a rather unnuanced condemnation of “the global market.” It struck me that the Christians I had just been with in China would have found that critique ludicrous. The market system had been...
Early on in my theological pilgrimage I was influenced by J. Gresham Machen, particularly his book Christianity and Liberalism. That book was published in the 1920s, during the struggles within northern Presbyterianism, between the adherents to the “old Princeton” theology and those who were advocating more liberal perspectives. Eventually Machen and his followers left to form a...
In an interesting piece in the February 11 New York Review of Books, Gary Kasparov—who reigned over the world of chess for two decades—reflects on his experience of playing against computers. In 1985 he played simultaneous matches against thirty-two computers, beating all of them. Since then, however, computers have become much harder to beat. But not, Kasparov...
The commentators are still letting Pat Robertson have it over his suggestion that somehow Haiti had the destruction coming because of that nation’s “pact with the Devil.” And Robertson deserves the criticism. Much of the negative commentary, however, doesn’t get at the real problem with Robertson’s theology of Satan. I’m sure the Devil is happy with what...
I watched the “Jurassic Park” movies. At least two of them—I’m pretty sure I did not see the third, and I probably won’t go back to catch up. If I weren’t a grandfather I would not have gotten into it at all.
In retrospect, though, I can see that what I originally endured simply out of...
Although it is not exactly a Christmas hymn, the words (and tune) of “In Christ Alone” were going through my head often during this Advent season, especially the opening lines of the second verse:
In Christ alone, who took on flesh
Fullness of God in helpless...
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