Jan 26, 2022 | Culture, Truth
I love and respect Tim Keller, immensely. Not only was he our pre-marital counselor when my wife and I were in seminary back in 1987, but his teaching has been a significant blessing to me both theologically and apologetically. I also pray for him daily as he deals with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. However, when he wades into discussions of politics he often loses me. Over the years I’ve always questioned the way he focuses on “social justice.” The phrase is loaded with political and ideological baggage, specifically Marxist baggage, and I do not believe Christians should use it. All justice is by definition social, so there is no need to use the phrase, and when they do Christians play into the hands of the leftist mob that dominates so much of political and cultural discourse. But here I want to address the issue of Keller’s moral equivalence between left and right. (more…)
Jan 18, 2022 | Culture, Plausibility
I was pleasantly surprised yesterday when I learned Jordan Peterson’s daughter, Mikhaila, had recently become a Christian. If you’re not familiar with Peterson, five or six years ago he became a cultural phenomenon by speaking what to most people is common sense, but not in the Canadian university setting in which he worked. One piece on him put it well, “Mr. Peterson is the canary in the toxic coal mine of political correctness and petty thought police.” He became a Youtube sensation back in 2015 when he started to challenge leftist Canadian groupthink. He then published a best seller called 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which launched him into a popularity he seemed to endure far more than he enjoyed. A good introduction is a documentary you can see on Amazon Prime called The Rise of Jordan Peterson. (more…)
Oct 11, 2021 | Culture
And it started out with some promise, which is why we ended up watching all seven episodes, but it went downhill from there. We (the wife and I) wanted to see where the writers and director took it, and we did. It was easily predictable, but I was hoping against hope that people who obviously have no clue about Christianity might get Christianity, but alas they didn’t. If you’re not familiar with it, Midnight Mass is a new Netflix series about a very strange little island with only one lone old Catholic church that eventually dominants everything on the Island, and in very unexpected ways. If you want to watch it and be surprised, I’d suggest you come back to this later because I can’t talk about it without revealing spoilers, including the next sentence. (more…)
Oct 3, 2021 | Culture, Plausibility
You might be familiar with the Netflix series, The Last Kingdom, and if so you might think it a very strange thing that it would have anything to do with my mind being programmed by modern medicine. I realized, looking back, how easily I, and by extension all of us, can be programmed to believe certain things. That programming is the result of the power of culture to shape and mold our perspectives on reality. The sociological term for that is plausibility structures, or the frame of reference in our mind that makes certain things seem real, and other things seem not real, plausible or not. (more…)
Aug 4, 2021 | Culture
One of my pet peeves is how easily Christians buy into the hostile secular cultural caricature of conservative Christians. What do I mean by that? The culture via its many powerful and ubiquitous means of communications communicates that Christians are generally unsavory characters. Then, being persuaded by the caricature not only do non-Christians believe it, but most Christians do too. So, in a book I recently read, Culture Apologetics, I found a perfect example of this lamentable trait among Christians. The book is great, but this is disappointing. I will quote the author to make my point.
The church is seen by many as an intolerant and judgmental community.
For Christianity to be desirable, we must narrow the gaps between how things are and how things ought to be.
According to Barna Research Group, the most common complain of those outside the faith . . . is that “Christians no longer represent what Jesus had in mind, that Christianity in our society is not what it was meant to be.” Christians today are known primarily by what they stand against instead of what they sand for. For the majority of people aged sixteen to twenty-nine, Christians are anti-homosexual, judgmental, hypocritical, too political, old-fashioned, insensitive, boring, unaccepting of other faiths, and confusing.
It is no secret that Christianity has a public relations problem.
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Jul 23, 2021 | Culture, Gratitude
That will depend on what our eyes and brain have been programmed to see, whether it is by the secular culture in which we daily swim, or God’s word. If it is the former, we’ll see a pretty butterfly, beautiful colors that amaze us, and that’s it. If it is the latter, we’ll see God! If it is the culture, the beauty will point to nothing beyond the beauty. If it is God’s word it will point to God! How could it not? If this butterfly doesn’t reveal God, what does it reveal? Chance? How does one explain where such exquisite and intricate beauty comes from? If there is no God, then the only explanation can be chance. How persuasive is that? Not very. When you understand that God is the consummate eternal all powerful creative artist, everything in nature compels you to worship so great a being that could create everything, including this very butterfly. We need to commit the words of Paul in Romans 1 to memory, and teach them to our children, and share them with everyone we encounter:
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
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