Though one can find necklaces, pins, and bracelets featuring doves, angels, and fish, the overwhelming theme for Christian jewelry is the cross, configured or nested in a wide array of options. You find them in wood, silver, and jade, constructed of nails, imprinted on dog tags, and mounted sideways on leather wristbands. I never paid …
Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people. Proverbs 14:34 (ESV) George Washington often promoted the idea that America’s success depended upon her religion. He made the case in his famous Farewell Address in 1796, and he argued the same point several years earlier when he spoke to the synod of …
Last year, while visiting some missionaries in Japan, I was struck by the homogeneity of Japanese culture. We spent a day at Tokyo Disneyland, and I don’t think I saw more than 25 non-Japanese all day long among the thousands of park visitors. This made for some serious cultural insularity, and I couldn’t help wonder …
Aristides of Athens was a second-century Christian author who wrote an apology addressed to the pagan Roman emperor Hadrian (or Antoninus Pius). The purpose of Aristides’s treatise was to defend the Christian faith against false accusations during the time when the Roman government persecuted Christians. Among other things, Aristides argues that the Christian moral code …
Care for the Socially Vulnerable in the Early Church—Aristides (2nd century) Read More »
The other day, I was at the checkout in a Louisville bookstore when I spied a display of refrigerator magnets with more or less humorous themes. Most were pretty snarky, some scatological, and a few proudly blasphemous. The first one that caught my eye featured an angler in a beautiful wilderness setting leaning over to …
Reza Aslan’s best seller, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, is a Procrustean Bed. (You remember the Greek mythological figure who sized people to his bed by either stretching them or lopping off limbs.) He’s willing to do a great deal of editorial and rhetorical violence to the Bible and to Jesus …