Summer is winding down, and students are returning to college. Whether they learn while seated, while remote, or while masked or unmasked will largely hinge on how your institution is waging the war against Covid. But either way, colleges will be back in action. But another war continues to rage in our colleges. It’s the war against objective truth. Higher education is soaked in worldviews and values that challenge, ignore, or overtly attack a…
On July 12, Amy Grant appeared on Apple Music’s Proud Radio with host Hunter Kelly. She participated as part of a conversation about the LGBTQ community’s place in Country music. She was also there, in part, to promote the 30th anniversary of the release of one of the most significant albums in Contemporary Christian Music history, her Heart in Motion. Grant’s name and her rise to popularity in the 1970s is synonymous with CCM. And…
Immediately following the Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in June 2021, incoming president Ed Litton and outgoing president JD Greear found themselves at the center of an uncomfortable conversation that was quickly fanned into a full-blown social media firestorm. The controversy centers on a YouTube video that was edited to toggle between a 2019 sermon by Greear and a sermon Litton preached in January, 2020, both on Romans 1. Anyone watching the video…
Kim and I found the address, but we checked our notes twice. Cars lined the street and filled the driveway. Did we have the right house? Hal Ostrander and his wife, Carla, had invited us for a quiet dinner. At least, we thought it would be quiet. The occasion was to acknowledge a milestone in my academic career. But it turned out, they wanted not simply to acknowledge this milestone. They intended to celebrate it.…
In 1995 I participated as a teacher in a pastors’ conference hosted by Ukrainian Baptists in Kiev. My two weeks there was my first experience interacting and teaching through a translator. Helen was one of our most dedicated translators. She was a young lady, twenty-something at the time, who had grown up at the conclusion of the Soviet occupation of her homeland. She was smart, engaging, and aspired to work in international politics. And she…
Americans are gradually emerging from Covid hibernation, returning to post-Covid routines and patterns of behavior. As we do, we are coming to terms with how much the crisis has changed us. And it’s not all good. A recent study by LifeWay Research in Nashville found, “As Americans attempt to move past the life-altering effects of 2020, their perspective is shifting on some of the most significant questions facing humanity.” And one of those questions strikes…
Five years ago, for most of us, Critical Race Theory (CRT) was barely a blip on our radar. But now it dominates our cultural conversation, pushed to the forefront by activists who claim to advocate racial justice, diversity, and economic equality. Now the tentacles of CRT are stretching into public education. CRT advocates are adding it to curricula for lower grades, but in New York, Nevada, Virginia and other school systems, parents are pushing back,…
In early April, writer and blogger Paul C. Maxwell announced he was no longer a Christian, joining the trend of professing Gens Y and Z Christians who have abandoned the faith. Whether you are familiar with Maxwell depends on how much time you spend online reading articles or hanging out where postmodernists and millennials wrestle with their faith, or whether you are a fan of John Piper’s Desiring God ministry where Maxwell had been a…
In mid-March, archeologists uncovered a fresh fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls in a cave on the outskirts of Jerusalem. It is a small piece around 2,000 years old, and it bears a verse from a Greek translation of the Old Testament prophets. The first batch of the Dead Sea Scrolls was discovered in 1947 by a Bedouin herder who tossed a rock into a cave and heard a cracking sound. He investigated and found…
I’m not a fan of “reality television” for reasons too lengthy to list here. But sometimes even the exploitation of “reality TV” can remind us of the better things we should aspire to. Consider the case of Rachael Kirkconnell. In mid-March, the 25th season of “The Bachelor” concluded with Matt James selecting Rachael Kirkconnell to be the woman he said he wanted to pursue a relationship with. But the woke mob had already marched through…