Month: February 2022
Dawson on the Other-Worldliness of Christianity
Dawson: But though the religion of that age was intensely other-worldly, its other-worldliness had a very different character from much that we have come to associate with the word in its modern pietist form. It was collective rather than individualist,...
Dawson on How the West Got Saved
Dawson: Unlike Christian Byzantium, Christian Rome represents only a brief interlude between paganism and barbarism. There were only eighteen years between Theodosius’s closing of the temples and the first sack of the Eternal City by the barbarians. The great age...
What Are Christians For?: An Invitation
We are in a new era of preparation. The deconstructors have come and, mercifully, will soon be gone. The world we have known is at an end. This is true for the church, I think, as many of the defining...
The Five Phases of Movement and Cultural Renewal
Start by listening to this Mark Sayers lecture from a conference in Melbourne a few years ago. Sayers argues that one of the ways the discussion about Christianity and the west has gotten off track is that it’s not really...
Hating God
In his book on the transformation of sexuality in the Roman world brought about by Christianity, Kyle Harper observes that Christianity was experienced as a deeply liberating force by many in the empire. For Romans, the sexual energy of men...
The Ecosystem
I see two problems that are going to catch the American church in a pincer maneuver if we don’t sort them out soon. First, our institutions are decaying, decadent, or dying and as the boomers die a lot of the...
Panopticon Discipleship
(I’m just trying to do some short stuff that would’ve gone on Twitter, in much less thoughtful, developed form, on the personal blog instead.) One of the trends I have noticed in many conversations with people who have left the...
Preaching in a Disorienting, Low-Competence Society
Beck: I think Newbigin was right. On Friday I was making Newbigin’s point by describing the modern world as “a moral vacuum.” And my point at the end of the post was to note that advice-giving has intrinsic appeal in...
Critical Race Theory Isn’t Going to Get You
In an old standup bit from a few years before his untimely death, Norm Macdonald mocked the way American media sometimes manufactures fear through their coverage of global affairs before memorably pivoting to the one country that really did scare him....