John Piper has some helpful, biblical reflections on celebrity pastors and hero worship. In a blog post from 2009, he writes: What is the meaning of the attention given to well-known pastors? What does the desire for autographs and photographs mean? The negative meaning would be something akin to name-dropping. Our egos are massaged if we can say we know someone famous. You see this on blogs with words like “my friend Barack” and the like. And I presume that, for some, an autograph or a photo has the same ego-boost.

In an Op-Ed for today’s New York Times, Karl Giberson and Randall Stephens complain about anti-intellectualism among evangelicals. They cite as a case in point the GOP primary field, some of whom reject evolution and that climate change is real and caused by humans. For Giberson and Stephens, these two items constitute prima facie evidence that evangelicals have checked their brains at the door. They go on to criticize Jim Dobson, Ken Hamm, and David Barton as if these three were the keepers of the entire evangelical intellectual tradition. I mean no disrespect to these three men. But if Giberson and Stephens think that these three represent the “evangelical mind,”…

Albert Mohler has a must-read column at CNN.com. It appeared as a lead story on the front page of CNN.com all day Sunday, and there is a good reason for that. He asks and answers the questsion, “Are evangelicals dangerous?” He surveys a number of different items from the news over the last year showing that there are many in our culture who think that evangelicals are indeed dangerous. Mohler shows that those people tend to be secularists whose vision of the world is rather parochial. Commenting on Ryan Lizza’s hit-piece on Michelle Bachmann last summer, Mohler writes, What stories like this really show is that the secular elites assume…

Defining what constitutes pornography has always been a bit of a struggle. It was Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who once illustrated the difficulty by giving his own subjective definition: “I know it when I see it.” I just read today that Carl Trueman has found as good a definition as I have ever seen, and he got it from The Catechism of the Catholic Church. Here it is: 2354: Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to…

D. A. Carson and Tim Keller have written a statement on The Elephant Room controversy on The Gospel Coalition website. There is much good, thoughtful material here. They begin with this: Recent discussion, mostly in blogs, regarding the forthcoming Elephant Room conference, sponsored by James MacDonald and Mark Driscoll, provides an opportunity to write a few clarifying paragraphs on confessionalism, boundaries, and discipline. Whatever else The Gospel Coalition has or has not done, it has not prohibited mutual criticism among Council members… The richness and detail of our Confessional Statement and our Theological Vision of Ministry demonstrate that we wish to avoid lowest-common-denominator theology. But how do we negotiate the…