If Christians wish to pursue justice in the nation, then they must be prepared to face professional costs just like Colin Kaepernick.
Liturgy formed Guests around Our Dining Room Table: An Essay on Liturgy and Life
We make a big deal out of our daily worship and we also make a big deal out of how we worship. We have a hunch that over a period of time how we worship forms us in mysterious ways that we can scarcely understand.
Why I Homeschool
Parents tend to have strong feelings about education. We all want to do the best we can for our children, and we can tend to resent any implication that the choices we make might be inferior to someone else’s.
Why I am a Feminist
God has created my child to be someone in particular, and God delights in their particularity. My goal as a parent is to help them live into becoming that person. Their bodies will play an important role, but the metric for their success is not to be determined by gendered stereotypes
Meet DACA’s Demise with Determination, Not Despair
When it is the church that adopts this framework, is that our very real and compelling obligation to the widow and orphan (and our laudably passionate concern for them) can lead us to unwittingly collapse the divine perspective into the political one. If, on a formal level, we engage in advocacy that disregards the value of words, what impact will we reap in our daily advocacy of the power of the Word?
DACA: Mirror to the Church
Participants in DACA—for all their model behavior—do not access hardly any social programs available to U.S. citizens. They are persons in limbo, living in the only country they have known, having literally arrived under the supervision of their parents, and now asked to leave that country, expelled into a country they do not know.
Gender & Authority: Finding Doxological Authority in the Church
The Christian blogosphere is inviting us to return to a doxological view of Christian authority—not one that forsakes traditional structures and the importance of accountability, but one that reminds us that all authority comes from Christ, and sometimes voices of truth are speaking from different sorts of pulpits.
Gender & Authority: Authority in the Blogosphere
So, essentially, there is the church, where you go to sit with all your children, trying to keep them from wiggling and running away, listening to a man exposit the Scriptures—however competently depends on so many variables—and then, when you wander out, there is not only the blogosphere, but now also the conferences and books and tribal pull of women gathering together to make their way through life.
Gender & Authority: Tish Warren, Jen Hatmaker, and the “Crisis” of the Female Christian Blogosphere in Historical Perspective
In the immediate aftermath of Warren’s piece, it appeared that Christian women were falling into two camps—rather than Jen vs. Angelina, we had Jen vs. Tish. But instead of taking sides, it might be more useful for us to realize that we are all, like them, products of historical and cultural forces that define our experiences and constrain our choices in ways we often fail to realize.
Gender and Authority: The Legacy of Sibling Rivalry
One theme of questions regarding authority struck me: Who has the authority to tear down others and to pit women against each other as enemies?Who gives us the right to shame, blame, and accuse fellow believers?
Total Eclipse
On Monday, we planted our feet in the reality of our tiny-ness. We stared like dopes into cereal boxes and walked around with cardboard over our heads because our eyes cannot handle the brilliance of 1% of the sun.
Fear in Charlottesville
Like many of you, I felt sick on August 12 after scrolling through line after line about the protests that were happening in Charlottesville. And if I felt sick on Saturday, I can’t imagine what my fellow beach compatriots must have felt.
After Charlottesville, Will White Pastors Finally Take Racism Seriously?
In the wake of the Charlottesville rally — and the country’s ongoing racial tension — we look to the church and ask, “White pastors, will you now work to end white supremacy?”
The Many Reactions to Charlottesville
The reality is that there is nothing true or right or important about the message of white supremacy. It is antithetical to the Gospel and the church must meet it with a full throated renouncement. What happened in Charlottesville was not caused by many sides, it was caused by the ignorant and evil views of white people who believe they are better because they are white.
I’m Racist (and So Are You)
This is exactly what hurts so much right now, the willful ignorance of everything that is happening around us. The quiet, arrogant assurance that racism doesn’t really exist anymore and that none of this would be happening if “they” could just “get over it.”
Imagining Discipleship through Narrative Metaphor
This is a call to unpack important dimensions of who we are and to appreciate the impact that the stories embedded in our imagination can have, both on what we believe and how we live that out.
Discipleship and Narrative Metaphor
If the Bible is the guiding rule of faith for God’s people, then narrative metaphors for discipleship should be those which have some substantial root in Scripture and the story of God’s people.
Discipleship and Imagination
In today’s piece, I will describe how these two “selves” function from a cognitive perspective, including the crucial role our imaginations play in tying the two systems together.
Supreme Court Term in Review: OT 2016
Amidst the gripping world of intellectual property, a few remarkable 1st Amendment issues, and a whole lot of uncertain buildup and wait-and-see in other areas, these are the major cases of OT 2016 in the Supreme Court.
Tourism with Worldview
When I travel, I am certain to face significant moments of discomfort, because the place I’m traveling to is not my home; everything is unfamiliar.
Letters from SPICE
During my Study Program in Central Europe (SPICE) last semester, I spent many assignment hours on reflections for my Culture and Society class. Some of those reflections took the form of letters—written to my past self, future self, past SPICE students, my parents, my Dutch ancestors, etc. Here, I’ve selected a few of those letters from a compilation I made …
Encountering the Land of Israel
Jerusalem is all about the intersection of the human and the divine.
Sin and Glory
Paul says that there is a war, and that it’s raging. It isn’t a war between Jews and Gentiles. It isn’t between us and them, or between right and wrong, or left and right. It is between law and grace. It is an internal war between I-can-do-it-on-my-own (independence) and come-to-me all-who-are-weary (dependence). It is between you-get-what-you-deserve and find-rest for-your-souls.
Friendship Through Citizenship
Instead of thinking that the role of a citizen is to vote and pay taxes, think of it as a gateway to building meaningful relationships.
Citizenship, Identity, and Populism
It is easy for people to celebrate globalization when their own jobs are not subject to foreign workplace export or replacement by imported foreign workers.