In the most recent issue of Touchstone magazine, W. Ross Blackburn takes on Richard Hays’ ambiguous stance on abortion. (Blackburn’s article is not available online, and that is why you must get a subscription to Touchstone magazine as soon as humanly possible!) Richard Hays’ The Moral Vision of the New Testament is widely regarded as the most influential book on New Testament ethics today. It has been proclaimed by Christianity Today as one of the most enduring books of the twentieth century, an eminent work of “evangelical scholarship.” Yet many evangelicals might be surprised to learn that Richard Hays’ position on abortion is somewhat left of the evangelical mainstream.

Pastor John Piper tells the story of a woman who “prophesied” over him after a church service one day: “Once a woman prophesied over me that my pregnant wife would give me a daughter not a fourth son, and that my wife would die in childbirth. That was not a helpful prophecy. It was pointless. And, as you know, it proved false. Love did not govern the use of that gift. That is not the way saving faith uses gifts” (source).

Examples of media bias are too numerous for me to comment on with any regularity. But sometimes I read things so egregious that I have to say something. An outrageously biased piece appears in a recent New York Times article by Lydia Polgreen and Laurie Goldstein.

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…

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.

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.