Reformation21

I see that my friends over at Mortification of Spin are taking a hiatus from having a go at conferences and big tent para-church ministries for the next week but thankfully continuing their obsession with critiquing complementarians. If you know of an event or a ministry they can take aim at in the...

I have been following the concerns raised over at the Mortification of Spin with respect to imbalances in the practice and teaching of biblical complementarianism (I think particularly of some of Aimee Byrd's posts - here and here ). I have long been an admirer of CBMW (Council of Biblical Manhood...

One of the most important things we will do at Second Presbyterian Church is disciple our children to a living, personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. We live in a society that assumes that when children grow up they will jettison the family's beliefs and values. But the Bible sees things...

God's people need to be prayed for. They need to led in prayer. They need to be taught how to pray. We all believe that prayer is important. Nevertheless, working our convictions about prayer into our practice of ministry is challenging. The Apostles declared "But we will devote ourselves to prayer...

Karl Marx didn't write all that much about religion, but what little he did was radical, programmatic, and rather clever. Here is almost his entire commentary on the meaning of religion as a cultural phenomenon: "religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and...

The persecution of Protestants in Scotland, at least if measured in martyrdoms, peaked in 1539, shortly after Cardinal David Beaton, a zealous opponent of reform, was appointed primate of the country. Glasgow witnessed the execution of two individuals that year: Jerome Russell, a Dominican friar...

Just a few weeks ago, the Oculus Rift started shipping out its Kickstarter units . These virtual reality (VR) headsets have been anticipated for years, especially since Facebook bought the parent company in 2014 . At the risk of using a tired word, this new technology will likely become disruptive...

One of my favorite aspects of teaching "Intro to Philosophy" is the chance to expose students to a sampling of, as Matthew Arnold once put it, "the best which has been thought and said." This takes planning, of course -- before each semester I make sure to build into the class schedule ample time...

Like many eighteenth-century Reformed pastors, Jonathan Edwards was confident in his ability to discern God's purposes in earthly events. For example, during a 1736 drought, he explained that God was chastising New Englanders for the "corruption in our hearts." Similarly, during a plague of crop-...

The Westminster Assembly The assembly of divines that authored a famous confession of faith, catechisms, and much more, met in Westminster, now a suburb of London, in the middle of a bloody civil war that tore apart, England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. The English parliament, for a variety of...