Well, this post will be a bit of inside baseball for those who keep up with currents in evangelicalism. The Christianity Today blog linked to these motivational posters that are parodies of the Emergent wing of the emerging church. They are pretty hilarious. One of the posters is pictured at right, but if you’d like to see the rest of them, click here. For those of you who are emerging and are offended by this post, let me even things out by offering you this parody of Calvinism: “25 warning signs that you might be obsessing about Calvinism.” Who said I can’t be an equal opportunity offender? 🙂
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Uneasy in Babylon
I am about five years behind everyone else in reading Barry Hankins’ Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture. I actually began reading the book a couple of years ago, but then got distracted and only picked it up recently to finish it. But don’t be deceived by the narrative of my history with this book. Uneasy in Babylon is a great read and will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the history of the conservative resurgence in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).
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The Surge Is Working
The most encouraging analysis that I have read on the progress of the Iraq War is Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack’s Op-Ed piece in today’s New York Times. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a foreign policy think-tank that is widely regarded as leaning liberal.
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John Piper: The Future of Justification
Pastor John Piper has written a book refuting N. T. Wright’s view of the doctrine of justification. The book is titled The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright, and it is set to be released by Crossway this Fall. Anyone who has been following the impact that the New Perspective on Paul has had on this critical biblical doctrine will want to read this book. The Desiring God website has an excerpt from the conclusion of the book on its website. Here’s a piece of it: “God has not ordained that living the Christian life should be the basis of our hope that God is for us.…
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FBC Pell City, Alabama
I have been on vacation for the past week, and this morning I had occasion to visit the First Baptist Church of Pell City, Alabama. I didn’t know anything about the church or the pastor as I walked into the sanctuary for morning worship. So, I was delighted to find how God-honoring it turned out to be. Pastor John Thweatt preached on Galatians 2:20, and the sermon was exceptional. I’m writing about my experience this morning because I think it’s worth noting when you come across something valuable. I have heard many Southern Baptist preachers, and there simply aren’t that many anymore who open up their Bible, explain the meaning…
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Rod Dreher on the Pope’s Recent Clarification
Rod Dreher comments on the Pope’s recent clarification that the Roman Catholic Church is the only true church: “It’s the pope’s job to explain and defend Catholic teaching, which makes unique and exclusive truth claims. It would be logically inconsistent for the pope to affirm Catholic teaching while asserting that churches proclaiming contradictory things are equally correct.
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Are Mormons Christian?
Dr. R. Albert Mohler finishes up his debate with Orson Scott Card over whether Mormons are Christians or not. Mohler’s last essay has words that relate to our earlier discussion about “the Great Tradtion.” Here’s how his summarizes his view that Mormons are in fact not Christian:
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Are Empires Evil?
It is pretty common to hear American academics labeling America as an “empire.” In June of 2006, for instance, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hosted the annual meeting of The Historical Society, the topic of which was “Globalization, Empire, and Imperialism in Historical Perspective.” A theme that appeared in the essays presented at the conference was the comparison of the United States to the various imperial regimes of world history.
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Is America an Empire?
Last fall, Hugo Chavez stood before the United Nations and accused America of being an empire and charged President Bush with being the Devil incarnate (source). Many Americans wrote off Chavez’s rant as the raving of a crackpot dictator. What many people don’t know is that Chavez’s tirade against “American imperialism” reflects a mainstream view among many people both within and outside of the United States.
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Why do they hate us?
A must-read piece appears in Sunday’s Washington Post. It’s written by Muslin writer Mohsin Hamid. During a recent trip to Dallas, a man in a bookstore asked Hamid, “Why do they hate us?” The Dallas man was asking why the Islamic world hates the United States so much. The rest of the article is an answer to that question. The answer boils down to this: