Reformation21

Returning home late one night in the early summer, I found that my van's transmission had died. Fortunately, it happened on my driveway; unfortunately I needed to be at the airport at 6am the following morning, which meant that I was placed almost permanently in the debt of the colleague who kindly...

Teaching history is probably one of the more depressing activities in which one can engage in the current climate. At an academic level, the discipline has been in self-destruct mode for some time, losing itself in a morass of hyperspecialised narratives, nihilistic epistemologies and general...

We Christians are caught in a dilemma: it is captured succinctly by Amos: "Does disaster come to a city, unless the LORD has done it?" ( Amos 3:6). It is simply not an option for us to remove God from the context of evil and then suddenly invoke him when the sun shines. This is true not just for...

In an article in the Chicago Tribune this week, Jodi Cohen and Maegan Carberry discussed the case of Kate Darmody, a winning member of the National Championship Women's Lacrosse team from Northwestern University. She, along with her fellow players had been invited to the White House to meet the...

Will there be a Starbucks store in heaven? It's a crazy question, I know, but humor me for a second or two. Perhaps we should ask the more theologically precise question: what exactly will heaven be like? It is initially surprising how little information we are given about the exact nature of the...

It should not escape the attention of the Christian disciple that some of the most profound spiritual mysteries are very often closely tied to time and history. Take the incarnation for example. Arguably the most weighty of spiritual realities, and yet Luke's accounting of this inscrutable...

What is it that causes some people to be more religious than others? Could it possibly be that some people are genetically predisposed to have certain spiritual experiences? Is there a "god" gene? Some people say that there is, or at least that this is what science is starting to show. In a book...

What is it that causes some people to be more religious than others? Could it possibly be that some people are genetically predisposed to have certain spiritual experiences? Is there a "god" gene? Some people say that there is, or at least that this is what science is starting to show. In a book...

Shortly before college I read Mortimer Adler's little classic How to Read a Book . That may sound like an odd title. After all, how could somebody read the book unless they already knew how to read? And if they did know how to read, then why would they need to read it at all? How to Read a Book...

Lisa and I believe that from the day our children first arrive in our home, our calling is to prepare them for the day when they will leave. It takes a long time for them fully to learn what it means to be a member of our household (at least it seems like a long time to us, and maybe to them), but...