Every year in September, I take my pastoral interns to a pastor’s conference in Washington, D.C. Every year, we stay on Capitol Hill in the home of some friends and very gracious hosts. This year’s trip was just this past weekend. For reasons that have nothing to do with the conference, our visit was unlike any I’ve ever experienced before. On Saturday night a little after 10pm, there was a shooting outside the home in which we were staying. Two of my interns were upstairs and heard the shots. Five of us downstairs watching football didn’t hear anything. One of the interns upstairs (whose name is Chris) also heard someone…
-
-
SBTS Professors Reflect on the Life and Death of Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk had a gift for communicating a Christian conservative vision to the the rising generation of young people, especially to college students. He was very effective, and his influence was vast. Our campus at Boyce College and Southern Seminary is no exception to that influence. Indeed, some of our students convened their own prayer vigils last night as a consequence of the shooting. All that to say, many of our students — especially at the College — have been impacted by Kirk’s life and horrified by his murder. For this reason, Dr. Mohler set aside the normal chapel program to have a time of reflection and discussion on the…
-
The Assassination of Charlie Kirk (1993-2025)
Late this afternoon, one of my students stopped me in a parking lot at Boyce College and asked if I had heard the news. I had been teaching for hours at that point and told him I hadn’t heard anything. So he informed me that Charlie Kirk had been shot and was fighting for his life in the hospital. My student then described in violent detail what had happened. The videos were all over social media, and he had seen the horrifying spectacle with his own eyes. He also asked me to pray—which I did as I hurried to my vehicle to get my phone out and see the news…
-
Violence in Charlotte and Men Without Chests
On this episode, Jon, Denny, and Colin discuss the senseless murder of a young Ukrainian woman, Iryna Zarutska, on the public transit of Charlotte, NC, and how it points to a cultural need for what C.S. Lewis called “men with chests.”
-
Discussing Deconstruction and Jen Hatmaker
In my last post, I linked to my recent column in WORLD magazine about Jen Hatmaker’s revealing interview with The New York Times. We discussed her interview and ministry further on this week’s episode of the CBMW Podcast (see below). The World and Everything in It also ran an audio version of the article. You can find it here or listen below. https://www4.wng.org/Denny-Burk-The-fall-of-Jen-Hatmaker.mp3
-
About the thing that happened at that Coldplay concert…
About the thing that happened at that Coldplay concert, I have seen countless memes and jokes about it online. I even saw a major grocery store chain create an ad out of it. This text from Ephesians comes to mind: “But immorality or any impurity or greed must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints; there must be no filthiness and silly talk, or coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks. For this you know with certainty, that no immoral or impure person or covetous man, who is an idolater, has an inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God” (Eph. 5:3-5).…
-
Malcolm-Jamal Warner (1970-2025)
I just read the news about the passing of Malcolm-Jamal Warner. According to reports, it was an accidental drowning. He was 54. For folks in my generation, Warner lives in our imaginations as Theo, the precocious teenage son of Clair and Cliff Huxtable. Even though it was a fictional family, they were nearly universally beloved. They were a picture of what everyone wished their family could be–loving, committed, loyal, not broken or perverse. They honored the grandparents and hung together. And they made us laugh. Pure joy. It was more than a sitcom. It was an ideal. An aspiration. That is why it was so hard to learn the distance…
-
No Facts or Evidence Required
In the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt on former President Trump, social media were treating us to an endless stream of uninformed “hot takes.” Although the better part of wisdom would refuse public speculation, precious few were so restrained. We were told that the shooter was a member of Antifa. We were told that he was Italian. There were even pictures circulating of some poor guy who was identified to be the shooter but who actually had nothing to do with any of it. Within minutes of the shooting, images and video from the site of the shooting began circulating. Some of these appeared on social media in misleading…
-
Walter Cronkite Reports on Roe v. Wade on January 22, 1973
Linked below is Walter Cronkite reporting on the Roe v. Wade decision on January 22, 1973. This early report reveals that very few people realized how expansive the Roe decision would prove to be. On the same day that Roe was decided, the Supreme Court also handed down a decision on Doe v. Bolton, which in effect gave us abortion-on-demand. Roe and Doe together ensured that a woman would have a right to abortion for any reason throughout all nine months of pregnancy. Roe then presided over the legal killing of over 60 million unborn children. That’s more than ten times the people killed in the holocaust. Evangelicals were caught…
-
Drafting Women into Combat?
Last week, the GOP majority in the House of Representatives passed the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). According to an executive summary released by the Senate Armed Services Committee, the bill would “require the registration of women for Selective Service.” If this were to become law and if the draft were ever to be reinstituted, women could be drafted into a U. S. military that no longer has barriers to women serving in combat. When news of this broke last week, I saw no major news outlets reporting on it. I wrote a column about it for WORLD magazine, but I hardly saw any major news outlets discussing it.…
