Dear Wormwood, Seeing as your Uncle Screwtape is busy after being promoted to a particular world leader, he has handed you over to me. Now, my dear Wormwood, I see that the possibility of a human war, and all that leads up to it, has enticed you. It is of vital importance to your mission that you remember your greatest weapon: a worldly contentedness. Perhaps you wonder, “But what sort of man would be content...
John M.G. Barclay, ‘Food, Christian Identity and Global Warming: A Pauline Call for a Christian Food Taboo’, The Expository Times 121 (2010): 585-93. Over the past couple years I have repeatedly returned to the article listed above. Not because I forget about the main point, but because I find it incredibly compelling. I just keep coming back to it. I pour over the arguments; they keep haunting me. And so, naturally, I tell everyone about...
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” In our world and in our current political climate, it seems that there are more things that divide us than unite us. Our world is supremely broken up and...
I work for a major insurance company known nationwide and which can be found in all states… and no, it is not Nationwide or Allstate. I started working for this company just over eight years ago. I started out in a call center taking calls for our auto insurance policy holders. People called in for various requests or questions, but I spent most of my days amending policies. After about a year I was sought...
Miller, Colin D. The Practice of the Body of Christ: Human Agency in Pauline Theology after MacIntyre. Princeton Theological Monograph Series. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014. 218 pages. Softcover. Retail: $26.00. Colin D. Miller’s The Practice of the Body of Christ offers a revisionist reading of Romans 5–8 and 12–15, approaching the chapters from the intersection of Apocalyptic Pauline readings, in the vein of J. Louis Martyn and Douglas Campbell, and virtue ethics in the...
The University of Aberdeen (in Scotland) will be hosting a conference on the legacy of the Reformation, entitled, The Freedom of a Christian Ethicist. It looks like a fantastic conference and if I hadn’t just moved across the pond I’d be very keen to check it out. The conference will be held 24–25 October, 2014 and the registration fee is only 20 GBP. Here is the promotional flyer. ...
I am very excited because I recently had the opportunity to contribute to two edited volumes that have finally appeared in print. The first volume is entitled, Sensitivity to Outsiders: Exploring the Dynamic Relationship between Mission and Ethics in the New Testament and Early Christianity (WUNT II/364; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), and the second volume is entitled, Insiders versus Outsiders: Exploring the Dynamic Relationship between Mission and Ethos in the New Testament (Perspectives on Philosophy and Religious Thought...
About a month ago, I wrote a post giving reasons why I believe Christians should be good storytellers. After I had shared it on my Facebook wall, one of my close friends commented, in a joking manner, that I should have written the article as a story. While he was only making light of the post, he unintentionally pinpointed one of the greatest temptations facing many evangelical churches today, to which many unfortunately succumb. This...
Is there any good reason—biblical, philosophical, scientific or otherwise—to believe in innate morality? This post is partly a sequel to my earlier response to Ray Comfort’s video, Evolution vs. God. If you haven’t seen the video or read my comments about the video, check it out here. I don’t intend to rehash that earlier post, nor do I want to address the Creation debate or the human origins debate further. Rather, after watching that video it...
The first thing you’ll probably wonder before reading the rest of this post is: what’s meta-ethics? For many philosophers, it is a topic that is debated by some of the brightest minds about whether rightness and wrongness are worth exploring. In layman’s terms, it’s the simple question, “does ethics exist?”. The last two posts I had talked about were rather straight-forward, giving you an idea what it’s like to integrate art with philosophy and a...
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