New historical research by Brian J. Wright shows that early Christians were surprisingly bookish. Brian J. Wright first experienced communal reading more than 15 years ago, which led him into the field of textual criticism and put him “three inches from the text.” He spent time photographing manuscripts and working with the fine details of …
What dissecting bodies taught me about the passion story and life after death. I sigh and look at the remains on the table in front of me: a pile of bones, muscles, ligaments, and organs. They are signs of dissecting, learning, and integrating knowledge. At the end of the semester, the cadaver still looks like …
It’s been a crazy week for America’s largest Protestant denomination. It’s been quite a week for Southern Baptists. Since this podcast was recorded, Baptist Press reported that a senior professor of evangelism and student ministry at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary had resigned over “personal and spiritual issues.” The same article also reported that an Alabama …
Whether we wear a uniform or not, we all have sacrificial service to offer. Memorial Day likely conjures up memories for all of us. Mine start from when I was too young to know what the day meant. When I was a young boy, it was a family time, a holiday from school or other …
Huckabee is far from the only Christian Zionist to appropriate the ancient ritual horn. Mike Huckabee, one of several American Christians in Jerusalem for the opening of the US embassy last week, announced that he planned to commemorate the occasion on live TV with a Hebrew greeting and by blowing a shofar. The shofar, an …
Evangelicals, we can no longer say sexual misconduct is just a Roman Catholic problem. The last few weeks have been excruciating for the Southern Baptist Convention and for the larger evangelical movement. It is as if bombs are dropping and God alone knows how many will fall and where they will land. America’s largest evangelical …
How to understand the “catastrophe” of 1948 and its impact on today’s Israel. On April 18, the fifth day of the Hebrew month of Iyar, Israelis celebrated the 70th anniversary of their country’s founding. On May 14, Palestinians commemorated the 70th anniversary of the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”), the year they lost their homeland to …
In Luke’s famous sister rivalry, Jesus isn’t warning against busyness. Earlier this year a paperwhite flower perched on my windowsill began to bloom. Small and green, it forced its way out into the sunlight. I had been busy planning a May wedding, and this flower embodied the promise of winter turning into spring—a gift freely …
We American Christians have a biblical call to reduce firearm deaths in our land. Violence enters the human story from nearly the beginning: “While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him” (Gen. 4:8). The Genesis narrative notes that violence soon becomes endemic. In a mere two chapters, we read, …
Nevertheless, the saucy British writer made the pious vociferously angry. Between 1941 and 1944, C. S. Lewis gave a series of BBC radio talks, eventually published as Mere Christianity, that are the stuff of legend. Less well known today is a series of BBC broadcasts during the same era written by Dorothy L. Sayers: a …