(Christianity Today) Brian McLaren, author of A New Kind of Christian and a prominent Christian speaker, led a non-traditional marriage commitment ceremony this weekend, according to The New York Times. Held at the Audubon Naturalist Society in Chevy Chase, Maryland, this ceremony included “traditional Christian elements,” but no bride. And the groom—one of them—was McLaren’s son, Trevor McLaren. The Times reports thatā¦
One of the things that struck me during the Chick-Fil-A debacle couple of weeks ago was a curious theme I perceived in the inundation of negative comments I saw on social media regarding the statements made by Chick-Fil-A COO Dan Cathy, who came out (no pun intended… no, really) in favor of “the biblical definition of the family unit.” What was thatā¦
In the wake of the recent shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, many folks in the West are probably just hearing about Sikhism for the first time. The following is an adapted excerpt from the brief section on Sikhism in Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: Exploring Belief Systems through the Lens of the Ancient Christian Faith. If there are any converts from Sikhismā¦
The following article was originally published on the Roads from Emmaus weblog in March of 2011. It’s been revised for this publication. I sometimes encounter folks who tell me that they are “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). I wish I asked more often what exactly that is supposed to mean, though I am usually held back from asking by a strong suspicionā¦
A fellow pro-life friend of mine recently sent me a post by the theologically and politically liberal Christian writer Fred “Slactivist” Clark in favor of abortion titled The ābiblical viewā thatās younger than the Happy Meal. It begins this way: In 1979, McDonaldās introduced the Happy Meal. Sometime after that, it was decided that the Bible teaches that human life begins atā¦
I know we’ve posted a number of responses to Leithart over the past several weeks, but his work is actually quite interesting and (we think) worthy of response. If anything, we respond out of respect for someone who’s engaging in his theology. Almost as if yesterday’s post summoned him forth, Dr. Peter Leithart tweeted today: I somewhat cynically read this as bothā¦
It has always been one of the central claims of the Protestant Reformation that what was being reformed was a distortion of Christian life. The foundational narrative of the Reformation has always been precisely one of return, which is why the watchwords ad fontes (“to the sources”) rang with such power. With an embrace of sola scriptura, it was believed the Protestantā¦
We’ve been a bit sparse on posts the past couple of weeks, so I thought I would at least put up a brief note so you don’t think we’ve disappeared.Ā Our collective quietness has been due, of course, to some summer vacationing, but also because some of us are attending to the professional habits that summer so often occasionsāconferences. I always imagineā¦
The following article was originally published on the Roads from Emmaus weblog in February of 2012. I spotted this image on Facebook today, and it puts forth a commonly accepted ethic, which I’ve dubbed here the Eminem Ethic. Essentially, various categories of race, sexual desire, physical appearance, and economic status don’t matter when it comes to winning his kindness. What matters isā¦
The new group weblog Orthodox Arts Journal recently published a piece by Nicholas Kotar with a rather ambitious title, “The Creation of a Christian Culture“: Of all the great callings that Christians are reminded of on a daily basis, the creation of culture is not among the most mentioned. I would even hazard a guess that many Orthodox would find [the callingā¦
