Gregory Coles says the church should offer “breathing room” for gay Christians, like himself, who want to pursue sexual holiness. During the 1990s and early 2000s, my grandmother actively supported the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), as well as her state’s amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman. When I …
Karl Barth thought we needed to be reminded continually of the obvious, which to Barth was not so obvious. Nearly 100 years ago, a book was published in Switzerland that, as one scholar put it, “landed like a bombshell on the playground of theologians.” That playground was inhabited by liberal theologians, and the bombshell was …
In its next chapter, the classic sci-fi series looks to clear the blind spots from its utopian vision. When Star Trek: Enterprise was canceled in 2005 for poor ratings and J. J. Abrams introduced his alternate “Kelvin timeline” for his reboot films four years later, seasoned Trek fans had cause to wonder whether they would …
The children’s ministry rethinks the competition at its core. One of the most important symbols in modern Christianity is a circle inside a square, its sides marked red, blue, green, and yellow, divided by diagonal lines. For some Christians, it is a literal mark of orthodoxy, a subtle indicator that a church teaches Scripture authoritatively …
Prayer—and lament—is the proper first response to tragedy. Editor’s note: This article was originally published in response to the 2015 San Bernardino attack. We can say with some confidence that all the following are true. 1.a. When news of a tragedy reaches us, almost all of us find our thoughts overwhelmed for minutes, hours, or …
After the influential Texas and New York bodies announce that their campuses are becoming autonomous, what’s next? Has one of the biggest trends in evangelical churches been eclipsed by a new one? Multisite congregations number more than 5,000 and researchers say this trend is as ubiquitous as the megachurch movement was 20 years ago. The …
How the ordered nature of the fruit found its way into modern computing. Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), the talented astronomer whose work paved the way for Newton’s Law of Gravity, ate pomegranates with curiosity. Rather than simply eating the fruit mindlessly—as an animal might—Kepler was drawn to the shape of its seeds. He was intrigued by …
We learn to spot a lie by studying the truth. The headline hit my Facebook feed at the peak of lake season: “Freshwater Shark Caught in Lake Lewisville.” Purportedly, a shocked fisherman landed a shark in the lake adjacent to my town. By the time the local news debunked the story, it had been shared …
At long last, Paul Schrader’s cinematic masterpiece. I have been waiting most of my adult life for Paul Schrader to direct a great film. In 1972, at the age of 26, Schrader penned a small, academic tome about the films of Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Yasujirō Ozu called Transcendental Style in Film. Two …
Como parte del imperio familiar, vivía en el lujo. Luego empezaron a surgir las dudas. Hace casi 15 años, en una costa afuera de Atenas, Grecia, me sentía completamente confiado en mi relación con el Señor y mi trayectoria ministerial. Viajaba por el mundo en un jet privado de Gulfstream haciendo el ministerio del “evangelio” …