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…