I tried hard to read Dan Brown’s latest novel, The Lost Symbol. I really tried. I had arranged to review it for Books & Culture—the pre-publicaton scuttlebutt was all about the Masonic Order, so I thought I could use the occasion to revisit some thoughts I have had in the past about Masonry. I bought […]
The “Rebirth Tour” we took last week in New Orleans was a moving experience. No description of the destruction that Katrina brought to the Ninth Ward can prepare one for actually seeing it up close. In our case, the experience was greatly enhanced by an extremely knowledgeable and articulate guide, Raymond Poret, whose commentary was a creative...
We went to the main New Orleans post office today, and the signs in the lobby said that there is only one daily pickup, at 6:00 pm. I asked a woman who was also mailing something why only once a day. “Oh, that was right after Katrina,” she said. “They’re back now to every hour.”
Our next stop was a...
The Vatican is investigating communities of nuns in America. Apparently the powers-that-be in Rome are convinced that many women in religious orders have gone too far with the reforms initiated by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. To conduct the investigation, Rome has appointed the head of one of the more tradiitional orders—a community of nuns who still...
The years 1638-1688 was not a happy period for Scottish Presbyterians, and that’s to put it mildly. The fact is that things got so bad that the last few decades of that period came to be known as “the Killing Years,” when many of John Knox’s followers were put to death, often en masse, because of their...
This originally appeared in a posting at Duke Divinity’s “Faith and Leadership” site: http://faithandleadership.duke.edu/blog/10-28-2009/richard-j-mouw-advertising-the-gospel
I’m a “Mad Men” fan. I am a year behind, so I watch Netflix DVDs while on my exercise bike each morning. In a Season 2 episode the head of Sterling and Cooper’s television division gets in trouble for a poor ad...
The subject of showing honor to ancestors is an important theological topic for Asian young people who are the first in their family lines to come to a faith in Christ.. Many of them struggle in very personal ways with the issue.
The topic came up again for me the other evening in...
We are off to Shanghai today, and I am taking my new Kindle with me. I bought one in spite of one writer’s warning that the font used by the Kindle reader is “grim and Calvinist”–a charge that I reflected upon a while back in a blog posting at Duke Divinity’s fine “Faith and Leadership” site: http://faithandleadership.duke.edu/blog/09-14-2009/richard-j-mouw-calvinist-does-not-mean-grim
2...
Last spring I posted a piece criticizing the proposed adoption of the Belhar Confession as a confessional document by some Reformed and Presbyterian churches in North America. I received a lot of criticism for my position on the subject. And the criticisms came from many good friends who saw my blog posting as a betrayal of sorts.
My critics ought...
In his latest Newsweek column, Fareed Zakaria discusses the views of people who think that President Obama’s call for a new global cooperation on nucelar disarmament is futile, even silly. As Zakaria characterizes this viewpoint, it assumes that nations like Russia and China are too self-interested ever to find genuine common ground. To ask them genuinely to...
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