Reformation21

Waiting for a flight to Philadelphia in Heathrow Terminal 4 recently, I engaged in my usual ritual: buying my children copies of the Beano and the Dandy comics, and some chocolate that tastes like real chocolate (seemingly illegal in the USA), and finding a present for my wife. A couple of years...

One of the questions I have been asked with some frequency over the last month or so is why my contributions to the Reformation 21 blog tend to have something of a facetious edge to them. I am tempted to answer simply that that is the kind of person I am. If you want a bland blog, there are plenty...

70s rock behemoth, Led Zeppelin had no greater track than Stairway to Heaven . Indeed, so secure is its position at the apex of rock music that many radio polls on the greatest rock music of all time frequently exclude it from consideration simply because the battle is really for second place. In...

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...