Ben Witherington enters the theodicy discussion that began with John Piper and that continues in the comments section on this blog. Witherington contests John Piper’s understanding of God’s sovereignty over calamities, saying that Piper is “just guilty of having an unBiblical view of God, that ironically is closer to the fatalistic one found in the Koran, than the Biblical one found in the New Testament.”
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Touchstone Forum on Evangelicalism
This is just a note on something that is coming in the November issue of Touchstone magazine. The editor has put together a forum on the state of evangelicalism today, and the contributors include Russell Moore, John Franke, Darryl Hart, Michael Horton, David Lyle Jeffrey, and yours truly. Here are the questions that we all answered:
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The Wonder Years: Nostalgic about Nostalgia
I’m a sucker for nostalgia. That’s why I got so hooked on the television show “The Wonder Years” back in the late ’80’s. It was a collage of laughter and bittersweet Americana. The characters were familiar and so were their stories. I loved it. The show ran for six years, but as the main character Kevin Arnold began to grow up, I eventually lost interest. When I noticed this summer that reruns of “The Wonders Years” had been showing on channel 26 here in Dallas, I wondered how the story had ended. In particular, I wondered how the central piece of the plot was resolved. Did Kevin and Winnie ever…
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September 11, 2001
Of course I’ll never forget where I was on September 11, 2001. My wife and I were in our second year of marriage, and we were living in Louisville, Kentucky while I was working on my Ph.D. On the morning of the attacks, I was in our apartment, and she called me from work to tell me to turn the television on. I think both buildings had already been struck by the time I tuned in, but I was watching live television as both of them eventually crumbled to the ground. The emotion of that day has left an indelible mark on me. The uncertainty. The questions. The very real…
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A Publicity Coup for Noam Chomsky . . . Not!
You’ve gotta feel for the guy a little bit. Everyone’s favorite linguist has put his best foot forward to write about politics and other areas outside his technical expertise (We know a little bit about that on this blog!). Nevertheless, Noam Chomsky seems to be the man of the hour among all the wrong people. Last Fall, Chomsky got endorsed by the world’s most notorious dictator, Hugo Chávez. And now this Fall, he has just been endorsed by the world’s most notorious terrorist, Osama Bin Laden. All in all, I’d say that’s a pretty bad 12 months worth of publicity. Talk about your unintended consequences!
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Al Mohler’s Comments on Mother Teresa
We discussed Mother Teresa’s “dark night of the soul” earlier this week. It’s also the topic of conversation at the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” blog. Dr. Albert Mohler has weighed in on the matter, and here is what he concludes:
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Luke Timothy Johnson Rejects Biblical Authority
Luke Timothy Johnson is well-known among those in my profession. He’s a prolific, accomplished scholar of the New Testament. But in a recent essay for Commonweal magazine, he offers a shocking public endorsement of homosexual marriage, as well as a blatant rejection of the authority of scripture on this issue. Here is the relevant excerpt:
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What Evangelicals Can Learn from Flannery O’Connor
I just received the latest issue of Touchstone magazine in the mail yesterday. You won’t want to miss Donald T. Williams’ article, “Writers Cramped,” in which he outlines three things that evangelical authors can learn from Flannery O’Connor. The opening of the article sets up and asks a penetrating question: My fellow Evangelicals publish reams upon reams of prose. What we have not tended to write is anything recognized as having literary value by the literary world. What makes this failure remarkable is that our Protestant forebears include a number of people who did: Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, George Herbert, John Milton, and John Bunyan, to mention a few. Equally…
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Southwestern Homemaking Degree on NBC
The College at Southwestern’s new homemaking degree has provoked a great deal of discussion under my previous post, “Drs. Patterson Defend Homemaking Degree.” This morning I watched NBC’s “Today Show” broadcast a story on the same topic. The piece has two parts: (1) a pre-recorded report on the homemaking program including footage from the College at Southwestern, and (2) an interview with two people who have opposing views about the curriculum. Part one presents a fairly well-balanced report. In Part two, the interviewer and the woman speaking against the program dominate the conversation. They don’t give much time at all to the guy from Focus on the Family who was…
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Sex Tourism and Outrage
Be outraged and appalled when you read Michael Gerson‘s shocking article on sex tourism. According to the article, one quarter of worldwide sex tourists come from America. He writes: ‘One sexual predator, when interviewed by the FBI, described his experience with foreign child prostitutes this way: “It’s like being a star. They want to try my food. They want to see what clothes I wear. They want to watch my television.” Such “stars” are the global consumers of innocence, exercising a particularly brutal form of power over the poorest, most vulnerable children on Earth.’ That “sex tourism” is even a viable industry is an indictment on the banality of our…