In 1969, Woody Allen interviewed Billy Graham on national television. Allen was agnostic and irreverent. Yet somehow Graham managed the encounter with humor and grace. It looks like the two actually established a genuine rapport, even though they couldn’t be any more different from each other. Allen would later point to this encounter as an inspiration for one of his movies. Here’s how one report describes it:
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Gay Marriage, Religious Exemptions, and Religious Liberty
When the New York legislature voted to legalize same-sex marriage last month, there were a handful of representatives who formerly opposed gay marriage but who switched their vote to legalize it. To a man, they justified their decision on the basis of the “religious exemptions” that would supposedly protect religious organizations from having to violate their religious beliefs. Anyone paying attention knows that such exemptions are flimsy and probably won’t stand the scrutiny of the courts. But even more troubling is the fact that the exemptions do not cover religious individuals, but only religious organizations. This difficulty is not theoretical but has already come to a head in Vermont (another…
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Bankrupt Borders To Close All Its Stores
When I was a seminary student, I lived across the street from a Borders Bookstore. I spent a great deal of time there studying for class and browsing the stacks. In the mid 90’s, national chain bookstores like Borders seemed to be coming into their own. That is no more. Yesterday Borders announced that it will be closing all of its stores by the end of September. The Associated Press reports that “It was brought down by heightened competition by discounters and online booksellers, as well as the growth in popularity of electronic books.” I get a little sad every time one of these bricks and mortar sellers goes belly…
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Post-op on the “Wild Goose Festival”
Several weeks ago, I wrote about a conference that was to take place in North Carolina called the “Wild Goose Festival.” News reports and the advance promo material made it out to be a kind of would-be-Woodstock for Emergent church types. The speaker line-up was a list of progressive all-stars: Brian McLaren, Jim Wallis, Shane Claiborne, Tony Jones, and many others. Musicians included Derek Webb, Jennifer Knapp, and others. I didn’t attend the conference, but someone from The Economist (of all magazines!) did. According to the report, about 1,500 people showed up, and they included “artists and musicians, nonconformists, post-Christians, non-Christians, disaffected evangelicals and a liberal evangelical subset known as…
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The Piper-Giglio Connection
In the Fall of 1992, I began my sophomore year in college. I had just experienced a watershed moment in my walk with Christ the previous summer as I had just realized a call to ministry. As the new term began, I was hungry for the word like I’d never been hungry before. It was that year that my good friend from high school, Steve Graves, introduced me to the ministry of Louie Giglio. I can hardly believe that it was nearly twenty years ago. Steve had begun attending a Bible study on the campus of Baylor University called Choice. Louie Giglio preached to about a 1,000 students every Monday…
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Postscript on Hell
Kevin DeYoung wrote a really helpful essay earlier this week on the doctrine of hell. In particular, he deals with the all too familiar meme heard from many Christians who say, “I don’t like the doctrine of hell, and I wish I didn’t have to believe in it. But it’s in the Bible, so I grudgingly accept it as truth.” I think Kevin’s response to this refrain is right on point, and I encourage you to read it if you haven’t already. I would also like to add my own little postscript to Kevin’s remarks. When I was in seminary, I wrestled with my own emotional response to the doctrine…
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Shannon Stone: Husband, Father, Hero, RIP
Last week, Shannon Stone took his six-year old son Cooper to watch the Texas Rangers play the Oakland A’s at the Ballpark in Arlington. During the second inning, Mr. Stone fell from the stands while trying to catch a foul ball that Rangers’ star Josh Hamilton had thrown to him. One hour later, Stone was pronounced dead at a local hospital. He was 39. There aren’t many pure things in the world, but one thing that comes close is a father and a son at a ballgame together. Yet out of nowhere, a most unexpected tragedy shoots a dart right into the heart of this family and leaves a boy…
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Iranian Pastor Told To Renounce Faith or Be Executed
Yousef Nadarkhani is a Christian pastor in Iran, and he has been charged by Iranian authorities with apostasy and evangelizing Muslims. Pastor Nadarkhani was sentenced to death, though some reports have claimed that this sentence has been annulled. Mark Kelly of Baptist Press reports that this is not the case: “Christians in Iran have challenged news reports that the death penalty for pastor Yousef Nadarkhani has been annulled, saying that in reality the country’s supreme court appears to have added a precondition requiring him to renounce his faith or face execution.” Read the rest of this story here and pray.
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The Necessity of Social Media
Patrick Pexton says that the metro editor for The Washington Post has made social media a requirement for all his reporters. Why? A case in point is the recent news that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner might be resigning. Pexton writes: “If you’re a print reader, you probably read about Geithner’s possible departure over your Friday morning coffee. But if you’re an online reader, you knew about it about 14 hours earlier. And that could be important if you’re an investor in New York, Tokyo, or Shanghai or if you’re a Senate staffer thinking about confirmation hearings or a Republican staffer planning on how to counter President Obama’s eventual nominee.” What…
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Carl Trueman Takes a Shot at City Theology
Carl Trueman has a brief but trenchant critique of “city” theology at Reformation 21. He writes: “One thing… I did discuss was the current nonsense about cities being special which so dominates the popular evangelical imagination. Not that cities are not important: as areas where there are the highest concentrations of human beings, they are inevitably significant as mission fields. Rather, we were thinking of the `from a Garden to a City’ hermeneutic which jumps from scripture to giving modern urban sprawl some kind of special eschatological significance. Was there ever a thinner hermeneutical foundation upon which so much has been built? OK, there probably has been, but this is…
