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Essential Books for Understanding Christianity
In today’s Wall Street Journal, George Weigel gives his Top 5 “Essential books for understanding Christianity.” I’m glad that he picked one old book, Dante’s Divine Comedy, but the other four are all from the 20th century. It seems rather odd to suggest that four of the five essential books for understanding a two-thousand year old religion would all have been written within the last twenty-five years. In any case, it seems to me that Weigel left off one fairly influential volume. As it turns out, this particular book has been pretty helpful for Christians throughout the history of the church. Needless to say, my “Top 5” would have looked…
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CNN’s “After Jesus”
If you missed CNN’s “After Jesus” special last night, you didn’t miss much. It was more fanciful musings on the history of earliest Christianity of the sort that we saw last Spring with the release of The Gospel of Judas, the media blitz of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, and the release of the movie The DaVinci Code.
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Apostate Episcopalians: “Avoid such men as these”
Several Episcopal congregations in the U.S. have decided the time has come for them to secede from the authority of their American Bishop. The New York Times reports:
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Barack Obama: An Empty Suit?
A friend of mine recently said to me that he thought Senator Barack Obama was an empty suit. Peggy Noonan agrees with this assessment in her column “‘The Man From Nowhere’: What does Barack Obama believe in?” Noonan’s critique of Obama as a politician is withering:
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Perturbed at Al Mohler?
No, I am not perturbed at Dr. Mohler, but the commenters at the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” blog are. Dr. Mohler has been contributing to this online forum for religious dialog, and his essays seem to be generating the most response from readers. As a matter of fact, the number of comments on Dr. Mohler’s essays have been positively disproportionate. Under Dr. Mohler’s most recent contribution, he has 275 comments (at my last count). Of the other seven panelists, the one closest in number to Dr. Mohler has 51 comments.
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Southern Baptists and Gay “Evangelicals”
The New York Times has printed a provocative piece today titled “Gay and Evangelical, Seeking Paths of Acceptance.” Like me, I’m sure you read that headline and can see that the oxymoron in the title betrays the bias of the author.
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Harvesting Body Parts from Aborted Babies
Here is the brave new world in which we are living. The Associated Press reports that Doctors in Oregon took brain cells from an aborted baby and implanted them in a 6-year old boy. Last month in Portland, Ore., doctors for the first time transplanted stem cells from aborted fetuses into his head in a desperate bid to reverse, or at least slow, a rare genetic disorder called Batten disease. The so-far incurable condition normally results in blindness and paralysis before death.
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Bruce Ware vs. Kevin Giles
Bruce Ware and Kevin Giles have been sparring over gender roles and the nature of the Trinity. The controversy came to a head in a paper that Dr. Ware read at the most recent meeting of the ETS. You can read about the encounter here, and you can download and read Dr. Ware’s paper here. Dr. Ware was recently elected to serve as president of the ETS.
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Shelby Steele on Victory in Iraq
I recently wrote a paper arguing that comparisons between the current so-called “American empire” and the Roman empire of old are tendentious at best. Yes, the United States is the lone superpower in the world and has complete military dominance among the nations of the world. But the United States does not colonize as a matter of government policy. As a matter of course, the U.S. does not conquer nations, occupy them indefinitely, and give them a government under the direct control of the U.S. government. After the U.S. wins a war, they leave. As Colin Powell said in 2003,