Jipp’s view is that Paul wants to offer “a robust theory of how relation to Christ is humanity’s supreme good, and is, therefore, necessary for human flourishing”, and he is right to insist on the importance of facing the inevitability of death”, as our “fundamental human predicament”, which means that in this life human flourishing is unobtainable because of the undeniable presence of sin and death (“this present evil age” — Galatians 1.4). But for Paul, of course, death is not the end; our only hope is that God has raised Jesus from the dead. Paul sees the possibility of a “transformed moral agency”, whereby we are seen to think, act, and feel in a way that is orientated towards, and therefore unified by, loving and worshipping God.

This is a very rich and powerful doctrine, in which Christ is seen as the “foundation of a new epistemology for persons-in-Christ”. Love is absolutely central here, making of us a sacred community, related to Christ and to one another, where the Church has to be a reconciling and forgiving community.

Jipp offers a very attractive vision of how “persons-in-Christ” can speak to our world. What, in your view, does it mean for any of us to flourish and live a good life in the world? I strongly recommend this book; it is not easy reading, but sheds interesting new light on the remarkable apostle Paul and his very telling use of athletic and military imagery.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

Book review: Nicholas King looks at being in Christ in St Paul's theologyhttps://t.co/baVGtgLjKc pic.twitter.com/ICUNsKhtA0

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 21, 2025

‘Christian faith is less about providing a set of cast-iron winning arguments, more about an invitation to “come and see“.’

–Rowan Williams, Discovering Christianity: A guide for the curious (London: SPCK, 2025) p. 93

Contemplative prayer classically finds its focus in the awareness of God at the centre of the praying person's being— and, simultaneously, God at the centre of the whole world's being: a solidarity in creatureliness.
— Rowan Williams, ‘On Being Creatures’ (76) pic.twitter.com/sa3CPJJf1H

— Jacob Sherman (@Shermanicus) January 27, 2025

In her introduction to your latest book, Jesus Changes Everything, Tish Harrison Warren mentions something many Christians are concerned about: that we live in a post-Christian world. She’s wondering if we actually are living in a pre-Christian world and whether that might not be such a bad place to be. What’s your take on the time in which we live and the opportunities in front of the church?

Well, the mainstream Protestant church is dying. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It makes us free. I mean, for some time people argued that the world would go to hell if it were not Christian. That may be the case. But being Christian doesn’t mean you need a Christian America. 

What I think we’re experiencing is the ultimate working out of nihilism, which so often goes with liberalism. Liberalism is the presumption that you should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story.

Read it all.

In an interview with @Plough’s Charles E. Moore, Stanley Hauerwas meditates on the necessity of the gospel, the politics of the kingdom, and the high demands of sanctification.https://t.co/XI9F2ySH5C

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) March 11, 2025

I have read many books by Alister McGrath, renowned scientist and theologian. I have appreciated all of them and, indeed, reviewed one very positively in these columns only a year ago (Books, 23 February 2024). This, though, is the best I have read (Feature, 21 February). It is quite simply brilliant, a must-read for those who want to reflect deeply on the whole question of belief. It will be particularly helpful to those who want to be able to defend their own. I remember Rowan Willams being quoted as saying something along the lines that it could be such a relief not to be made to feel foolish for embracing belief. No one who has read this book need do that.

The intention of the author is consider belief in general, not just religious belief. Demonstrating clearly that it just won’t do to pretend that we live in a “purely factual, belief-free world”, he concludes that “believing is not only intellectually defensible but existentially necessary” (his italics). He offers many fascinating references from a variety of disciplines as, with characteristic clarity and accessibility, he presents a highly sophisticated argument.

In powerful testimony, McGrath explains how, having been raised in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, he gave up on religion. His first love was the natural sciences; he became an atheist with a strong interest in Marxism. It was as an Oxford undergraduate — ironically, through reading the atheist Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy — that he began to realise that it was possible to hold beliefs without being able to prove them and, in fact, that to live life to the full it was imperative to do so. “Only shallow truths can be proven,” he writes, “not the profound existential, moral and spiritual beliefs that bestow dignity and significance upon human life.”

Read it all.

"It is quite simply brilliant, a must-read for those who want to reflect deeply on the whole question of belief." @BishopJohnInge reviews Why We Believe: Finding meaning in uncertain times by @alisteremcgrath https://t.co/njISQN0hnN

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 7, 2025

To understand Douthat’s method, recall a scene from the end of the third Indiana Jones film. Indy is faced with a choice: Let his father die or take a leap of faith. The leap in this case is literal, a physical step into a chasm with nothing to hold him up. He takes the step, and by a miracle of movie magic, doesn’t fall. There was a bridge in front of him all along, invisible to the human eye.

For some, this is a picture of true faith: a passionate, even reckless jump into the unknown, based on blind trust, not reason. Douthat demurs. As he writes, “Joining and practicing [some faith] is fundamentally a rational decision, not just an eyes-closed, trust-your-friends-and-intuitions jump.” You can and should consider the case in your mind.

Moreover, whatever the social benefits of church—and they are many!—they aren’t the place to start. They’re a byproduct of the thing itself, and that’s of interest only if it’s true. That’s why Douthat opts to “start with religion’s intellectual advantage: the ways in which nonbelief requires ignoring what our reasoning faculties tell us, while the religious perspective grapples more fully with the evidence before us.”

This is not a case for mere Christianity, then, so much as “mere religion.” Though Douthat ends the book with a chapter explaining why he is Roman Catholic, his aim is to clear the ground for religious commitment in general, to show why Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews as much as Catholics and Protestants are not exotic residue of a superstitious past.

Read it all.

Christianity is having a moment.

Intellectuals are converting. Atheists are softening. Agnostics are hungry.@DouthatNYT’s “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious” is a response to this moment and to the readers he’s trying to reach. https://t.co/UfEYYzZxbb

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) February 11, 2025

But when our institutions are weak and frayed, as many say they are now, the mature response is to root out bureaucratic rot while also strengthening our common bonds—the approach of a spade in one hand and sword in the other we see in Nehemiah 4:17. We defend and build simultaneously. We cannot simply critique church without seeking its peace and purity. We cannot tear down without also building up. We cannot sever spiritual growth from the manner and place in which Jesus says it takes place: the church.

Yuval Levin recently reminded us in the journal The New Atlantis that such institutional building is others-centered. We must take attention away from self to build for other (future) people. Levin’s criticism is sharp: “The inability to value those other people and judge them worthy of our work and sacrifice is a characteristic failing of a decadent society.” When we focus exclusively on our self-experience to the detriment of others, in the present or future, our cultural artifacts resemble a stagnant pond. There is no life there. 

In 2020, Ross Douthat identified American society as being in a period of decadence, “something that comes on civilizations when they’ve reached a certain stage, and it’s not clear where they go next.” Decadence, Douthat believes, happens after the ladder of success has been climbed: a sort of stalemate of cultural production and dialogue. Movies rehash the same stories, and sequels rule the day. We often see this stagnation in form before we see it play out in content.

Blue Like Jazz’s form felt new and edgy for young millennials and Gen Xers in 2003. In hindsight, the fruit it bore is that of a decadent society where the self is ultimately authoritative, where individuals self-select into churches that feed their values (rather than sharpen like iron on iron), and where our Christian message is no different from the world’s—if we stay in the church at all.

Read it all.

US fourth- and eighth-grade students are struggling with reading comprehension with last year’s nationwide testing showing the worst results in over two decades.

Average reading scores deteriorated among students who took the Congressionally-mandated assessment in 2024, according to results released Wednesday from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

“This is a major concern,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the test known as the Nation’s Report Card every two years. “Our nation is facing complex challenges in reading.”

Read it all.

US fourth- and eighth-grade students are struggling with reading comprehension with last year’s nationwide testing showing the worst results in over two decades. https://t.co/mHk2GPQyId

— Bloomberg Markets (@markets) January 29, 2025

Readers interested in the growing diversity of the Christian story will find it useful to consider Shaw’s work alongside another recently published volume, The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present. Though focused mainly on African Christianity, it features several articles on the work of Black missionaries. Noteworthy contributions come from historians like Brian Stanley (who examines the important role of Black missionaries in Africa), David Killingray (who shows how emancipated slaves served the missionary movement), and Kimberly Hill (who considers how the concept of “Ethiopianism” spurred Black efforts at evangelization).

Studies like these offer a richer and fuller picture of the diversity of Christianity. Africans and African Americans embraced the gospel, transformed it in significant ways, and then made remarkable contributions to the growth of Christianity. Even today, we are only now beginning to appreciate the contours of this story. As Killingray notes, even the “evangelization of Africa” was “in the hands of Africans” and “often out of sight of European missions.”

Historians are now bringing these stories into the open, casting new light on the prophetic remarks of King David in Psalm 68:31–32. In the words of the King James Version, “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” and sing the praises of the Lord.

Read it all.

Sermons, letters, diaries, journals.

A new book sifts through documents to bring to light the nineteenth-century history of African American missionaries.https://t.co/momIunqmmF

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) January 23, 2025

Neither N. T. Wright, author of major original theological research such as The Resurrection of the Son of God or The Climax of the Covenant, nor Tom Wright, author of the popular series . . . for Everyone (including two slim volumes, Acts for Everyone), needs any introduction. The current volume springs from a series of lectures first delivered in Oxford in 2023 and elaborated in Houston, Texas, during that summer. It is typical of the author’s informal and cheerful spoken style; the reader experiences him challenging, correcting an imaginary audience, almost singing the occasional musical illustration.

Clearly the product of wide learning, the book is not itself a work of scholarship, but, as it claims, a challenge. There are brilliant nuggets, such as the bracketing of Acts at beginning and end by emphasis on the Kingdom of God restored to Israel or the critical sketch of the Church at Corinth, “arrogant, puffed up, casual, chaotic, soft” because they avoided persecution, or the claim that worship of the gods then was like electricity today: no household could function without it. But the real joy of the book is its confident, free-ranging suggestions for further explorations: e.g. a new Temple theology.

Read it all.

(2009 [London] Times) Tom Wright–The Church must stop trivialising #Easter https://t.co/QRZfgvbKEq #easter2019 #anglican #theology #apologetics #21stc pic.twitter.com/iJmw4MoY9g

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) April 22, 2019

What can we say about The Widening of God’s Mercy?

 In the light of the points noted in the course of this review we have to say that Chris and Richard Hays do not offer a persuasive argument in The Widening of God’s Mercy.

They do not show that the biblical laws were revised or that different laws contradict one another.

They fail to recognise that in Isaiah 2 and 56 the advent of universal peace and the inclusion of foreigners and eunuchs is dependent on the nations and particular individuals submitting to God’s law

They fail to show that God changes his mind and admits to having given his people bad laws.

They fail to show that John 16 talks about further revelation through the Spirit that supersedes biblical teaching.  

Finally, they fail to show that rules, boundaries and theologies are rethought in the Bible, they misrepresent the thought of Karl Barth, they say that LGBTQ people need to be included when the New Testament says that they already are, and they fail to distinguish between welcoming people and affirming their behaviour.  

Read it all.

Here's my review of Richard & Christopher Hays' new book "The Widening of God's Mercy" for @TGC.
They haven't found new evidence that changes what the Bible says about same-sex sex. They're offering a sub-theistic view of God to justify their conclusions.https://t.co/17acFfKTHI

— Rebecca McLaughlin (@RebeccMcLaugh) August 29, 2024

Before the service starts on Sunday morning at San Diego Reformed Church, the building fills with the sound of singing. Sean Kinnally, an associate pastor, leads a 45-minute Psalm-sing so the congregation can practice reading music together and using printed hymnals.

“We’re seeking to add more and more hymns—it’s a more robust form of worship,” Kinnally said. “There has been incalculable growth in the singing at our church.” 

San Diego Reformed is in the process of shifting its worship toward hymnal-aided congregational singing. The congregation is part of what appears to be a growing number of churches working to recover the practice—never entirely lost, but not as popular as it used to be—of singing from books.

Hymnals offer perceived permanence and stability in a musical landscape that changes quickly and often. The decision to reintroduce congregations to hymnals is often an ideological one, especially for churches that made the transition away from them in recent decades.

Read it all.

A number of churches are choosing the printed page over lyrics projected onto a screen.

“Hymnals offer perceived permanence and stability in a musical landscape that changes quickly and often,” said Dan Kreider, the composer of the “Sing! Hymnal.”https://t.co/MfajqRkS5w

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) October 20, 2024

By Williams’s estimation, our societal disregard for God’s image in mothers and children has a far-reaching impact. It means that we see pregnancy as a sickness to be prevented or solved by means of birth control or abortion. It means we reduce our children’s existence to an “assembly-line life,” obsessing over educational achievement and resisting the reality that “children, like all people, are unpredictable individuals and are not made for the convenience of their parents.” It means we force new moms back to work too early, pitting their careers against their children. 

Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic begins by describing contemporary problems. But disdain for mothers and children, Williams demonstrates, was also characteristic of antiquity. Drawing on myths, literature, and histories from Greek and Roman writers, she describes a past in which women were sexually exploited, infants were left “exposed” on “village dung heaps,” and anyone who couldn’t achieve military victory on the battlefield was a second-class citizen by default. 

It’s Christianity, she argues, that changed all of this—that gave us the human rights we take for granted, that blessed the meek and lowly instead of kowtowing to the powerful. “It is because of two millennia of Christian valuing of human life,” she states forcefully, that “we do not delight in the suffering of the weak.” Both the life of Christ and the writings of the church fathers demonstrate that “the church is responsible for caring for the bodies and souls of the neglected and the abandoned at all ages and life stages, because their lives are priceless.”

Read it all.

In western post-Christian society, humans are treated more like commodities than image bearers.

In ‘Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic,’ @NadyaWilliams81 uses ancient and modern sources to show how Christians can value life amidst an empire that seeks to dehumanize it. pic.twitter.com/ErT36b1P0n

— IVP Academic (@ivpacademic) October 15, 2024

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

Appalling.
The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books – The Atlantic https://t.co/xK0Aru2Enm

— Carlton Larson (@carltonfwlarson) October 1, 2024

….he believes that there are good reasons to challenge simplistic accounts of Christianity’s rise and fall. For a start, it is enjoying significant numerical growth globally and, closer to home, the crises engulfing organised religion do not necessarily translate into an equivalent embrace of atheism or wholesale rejection of Christian beliefs and values. The contribution made by Christian agencies to aid and development work around the world is immense even if seldom acknowledged. He robustly challenges secularisation theories prevalent among sociologists since the 1960s. He maintains that we are “metaphysical animals . . . unlikely to abandon age-old quests for a fundamental and inclusive context of meaning”.

Nevertheless, “mainstream European culture is hurtling forward largely without the fuel that Christianity has historically supplied”. This has disturbing consequences acknowledged even by avowed atheists. But the question remains whether Christianity’s credal credentials can enable it to fuel a sustainable culture into a future threatened by complex existential crises facing humanity and the environment.

Shortt responds to such a challenge, first, with an exposition of just how shallow and insipid so much atheist polemic has been of late. He eloquently defends both the meaning and the mystery of Christian beliefs founded upon scripture and tradition as objectively credible even if, as the biblical critics and liberal theologians for whom he has little affection attest, it is ultimately unfathomable. Shortt entitled one of his books The Hardest Problem and tackled head-on the problem of evil with appropriate humility. while confident that it does not hole Christianity below the water line — a case that he succinctly summarises here.

Read it all (subscription or registration).

"He believes that there are good reasons to challenge simplistic accounts of Christianity’s rise and fall."

John Saxbee reviews The Eclipse of Christianity: And why it matters by Rupert Shortt https://t.co/oRYQTpKpas

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) September 21, 2024

The scholarship of the author shines through the pages of the book as he ponders deeply on what he believes “the duty of man” to entail and what the main thing is that makes for the good life during our sojourn here on earth. It is, he tells us, Avodat Hashem: service (or worship) of the Name, honouring God in everything.

That will mean, as he summarises it in the final text of his letter to his children, in the last ten pages of the book, after much rich reflection: grasping the truth of being made in the image of God, male and female; valuing family, neighbours, toil, and friendship; exhibiting patience, humility, hope, and forgiveness in the face of suffering; finding joy, especially in the recognition of our exhaustive grasp by God’s love; and living within the Church’s time as well as our own. All this we are called to do while acknowledging that God can be “a question, an encounter, a discovery, a struggle, sometimes (too often, perhaps) even a loss and a cry”.

This leaves out much of what is nowadays generally thought to be Christian political duty, which I found something of a relief: it is a modest manifesto powerfully articulated, which I found deeply attractive. Crucially, as the title implies, the book is offered as a vision of the good life lived in the light of mortality….

Read it all.

Mortal Goods
Reimagining Christian Political Duty

Ephraim Radner

This book by one of today’s leading theologians examines how Christians might more faithfully and realistically imagine their political vocation.

Ephraim Radner explains that our Christian calling is to limit our… pic.twitter.com/FuAJeBEoxH

— Theology Books (@theology_books) April 14, 2024

The British biologist J. B. S. Haldane once quipped that “there is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god”. The concept of “playing God” is a well-known cultural trope. For most people the phrase implies Promethean hubris, an arrogant overextension of human capabilities and ambitions beyond what is appropriate, potentially leading to unforeseen and uncontrollable consequences. But who decides what humanity’s “proper” limits might be? Might the quest for a deeper understanding of our world be an act of service, aimed at safeguarding our world on the one hand and promoting human flourishing on the other?

Playing God: Science, religion and the future of humanity by Nick Spencer and Hannah Waite offers an engaging and helpful overview of the contemporary debates on these themes. Both writers are associated with the London-based Theos think tank, which hosts public debates, discussions and lectures about religion and society. Although the theme of “playing God” is emphasized in the work’s main title, its focus is better seen as an exploration of the interaction of science and religion in discussing a series of questions raised, but not answered, by technological advance.

Read it all.

'The question shifts from whether we should play at being God to how we should do this.'

Alister McGrath (@alisteremcgrath) on what theology might teach us about technological hubris
https://t.co/KsRh8JBYti

— The TLS (@TheTLS) August 23, 2024

 I’ve said she is theological without being dogmatic, but I think the key to her project involves making space for theology more than defending specific claims. It’s the realm of metaphysics she cares about, the idea that our experience suggests something grander about us and about our apprehensions than our scientific models can account for. For her, the Christian narrative gives that transcendent realm its coordinates, but it’s our experience as human beings—Christians or non-Christians—that tells us that we matter and that the universe has beauty. She wants to recover a place for that mattering.

The gift of Marilynne Robinson’s long shelf of late work, then, is its refusal of cynicism, its declaration of wonder and awe, and its affirmation that our little minds haven’t exhausted the meaning of the universe—and won’t. Long before Robinson picked up her pen, Simone Weil told us that we’d already “lost the whole poetry of the cosmos.” Robinson hasn’t given up on that poetry.

One of my favorite notes of gratitude and hope comes in her novel Gilead (2004). “In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe,” her minister-hero declares, “and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.” It’s a startling image. It reverses the sense that our lives are trivial details in an unimaginable vastness. In Robinson’s vision, the universe—and the God who wills the universe into existence at the beginning of the book of Genesis—has a deep interest in us, such that even our follies are part of some epic song. It’s elevating. Maybe it’s fanciful, or maybe it’s true and sublime. “It depends upon the universe,” as Saul Bellow’s Herzog decides, “what it is.”

Read it all.

There are a handful of writers that, when I read them, I marvel at both their writing and wisdom.

I just completed Marilynne Robinson’s *Reading Genesis*, and I can assure you of her place on that short list.

She has clearly walked closely with the Lord these many years. pic.twitter.com/UCJQdSG7mJ

— Steve Bezner (@Bezner) May 4, 2024

Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.1 It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species, and not upon others. I know about this moaning because I have done my share. Life is a series of problems..What makes life difficult is that the process of confronting and solving problems is a painful one. Problems, depending upon their nature, evoke in us frustration or grief or sadness or loneliness or guilt or regret or anger or fear or anxiety or anguish or despair. These are uncomfortable feelings, often very uncomfortable, often as painful as any kind of physical pain, sometimes equaling the very worst kind of physical pain. Indeed, it is because of the pain that events or conflicts engender in us all that we call them problems. And since life poses an endless series of problems, life is always difficult and is full of pain as well as joy.”

–M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled, quoted by yours truly in last Sunday’s sermon

Scott Peck’s best seller “The Road Less Travelled” (https://t.co/wggkqnfgkU ) has a trememdous impact on the 20th century, because he dared to reveal the great truth that most people are stuggling, whether they are the homeless or rich and famours.
Yes, fife is difficulties and… pic.twitter.com/hDp87ex3FV

— Dr. Paul T. P. Wong (@PaulTPWong) June 19, 2023

“In Philadelphia, the same day as the British landing on Staten Island, July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress, in a momentous decision, voted to ‘dissolve the connection’ with Great Britain. The news reached New York four days later, on July 6, and at once spontaneous celebrations broke out. ‘The whole choir of our officers … went to a public house to testify our joy at the happy news of Independence. We spent the afternoon merrily,’ recorded Isaac Bangs.”

“A letter from John Hancock to Washington, as well as the complete text of the Declaration, followed two days later:

“‘That our affairs may take a more favorable turn,’ Hancock wrote, ‘the Congress have judged it necessary to dissolve the connection between Great Britain and the American colonies, and to declare them free and independent states; as you will perceive by the enclosed Declaration, which I am directed to transmit to you, and to request you will have it proclaimed at the head of the army in the way you shall think most proper.’ “Many, like Henry Knox, saw at once that with the enemy massing for battle so close at hand and independence at last declared by Congress, the war had entered an entirely new stage. The lines were drawn now as never before, the stakes far higher. ‘The eyes of all America are upon us,’ Knox wrote. ‘As we play our part posterity will bless or curse us.’

“By renouncing their allegiance to the King, the delegates at Philadelphia had committed treason and embarked on a course from which there could be no turning back.

“‘We are in the very midst of a revolution,’ wrote John Adams, ‘the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations.’

“In a ringing preamble, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, the document declared it ‘self-evident’ that ‘all men are created equal,’ and were endowed with the ‘unalienable’ rights of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ And to this noble end the delegates had pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.

“Such courage and high ideals were of little consequence, of course, the Declaration itself being no more than a declaration without military success against the most formidable force on Earth. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, an eminent member of Congress who opposed the Declaration, had called it a ‘skiff made of paper.’ And as Nathanael Greene had warned, there were never any certainties about the fate of war.

“But from this point on, the citizen-soldiers of Washington’s army were no longer to be fighting only for the defense of their country, or for their rightful liberties as freeborn Englishmen, as they had at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill and through the long siege at Boston. It was now a proudly proclaimed, all-out war for an independent America, a new America, and thus a new day of freedom and equality.”

—-David McCullough, 1776

Happy 4th of July! Be safe and enjoy the day. pic.twitter.com/jkFAqIhwaa

— U.S. Army Reserve (@USArmyReserve) July 4, 2024

Have not many of us, in the weary way of life, felt, in some hours, how far easier it were to die than to live?

The martyr, when faced even by a death of bodily anguish and horror, finds in the very terror of his doom a strong stimulant and tonic. There is a vivid excitement, a thrill and fervor, which may carry through any crisis of suffering that is the birth-hour of eternal glory and rest.

But to live,–to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually smothered,–this long and wasting heart-martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after hour,–this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or woman.

When Tom stood face to face with his persecutor, and heard his threats, and thought in his very soul that his hour was come, his heart swelled bravely in him, and he thought he could bear torture and fire, bear anything, with the vision of Jesus and heaven but just a step beyond; but, when he was gone, and the present excitement passed off, came back the pain of his bruised and weary limbs,–came back the sense of his utterly degraded, hopeless, forlorn estate; and the day passed wearily enough.

Long before his wounds were healed, Legree insisted that he should be put to the regular field-work; and then came day after day of pain and weariness, aggravated by every kind of injustice and indignity that the ill-will of a mean and malicious mind could devise. Whoever, in our circumstances, has made trial of pain, even with all the alleviations which, for us, usually attend it, must know the irritation that comes with it. Tom no longer wondered at the habitual surliness of his associates; nay, he found the placid, sunny temper, which had been the habitude of his life, broken in on, and sorely strained, by the inroads of the same thing. He had flattered himself on leisure to read his Bible; but there was no such thing as leisure there. In the height of the season, Legree did not hesitate to press all his hands through, Sundays and week-days alike. Why shouldn’t he?””he made more cotton by it, and gained his wager; and if it wore out a few more hands, he could buy better ones. At first, Tom used to read a verse or two of his Bible, by the flicker of the fire, after he had returned from his daily toil; but, after the cruel treatment he received, he used to come home so exhausted, that his head swam and his eyes failed when he tried to read; and he was fain to stretch himself down, with the others, in utter exhaustion.

Is it strange that the religious peace and trust, which had upborne him hitherto, should give way to tossings of soul and despondent darkness? The gloomiest problem of this mysterious life was constantly before his eyes, souls crushed and ruined, evil triumphant, and God silent. It was weeks and months that Tom wrestled, in his own soul, in darkness and sorrow. He thought of Miss Ophelia’s letter to his Kentucky friends, and would pray earnestly that God would send him deliverance. And then he would watch, day after day, in the vague hope of seeing somebody sent to redeem him; and, when nobody came, he would crush back to his soul bitter thoughts,that it was vain to serve God, that God had forgotten him. He sometimes saw Cassy; and sometimes, when summoned to the house, caught a glimpse of the dejected form of Emmeline, but held very little communion with either; in fact, there was no time for him to commune with anybody.

–Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

#OTD, 1850: Harriet Beecher Stowe arrives in Brunswick. She wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in her husband Calvin's study in Appleton Hall (he was Class of 1824 and taught theology at Bowdoin) and at their home on Federal St, often hosting students to discuss drafts of the book. pic.twitter.com/6IlBvkhoDl

— Bowdoin College (@BowdoinCollege) May 25, 2020

In a moving, heartbreaking and yet hopeful book, Amy Low writes of finding miracles in the mundane details of life, while dying of cancer. https://t.co/FrJd9H4t4u

— Bob Smietana (@bobsmietana) June 27, 2024

D. J. Taylor, a leading scholar on Orwell, has written a book that can be used as an introduction, as he gives us all the basic facts of Orwell’s life; but it will be more useful to people who already know something about him. Using Orwell’s life, and his writings and novels of the time, on which he is an expert, Taylor explores certain themes in depth. One of these is religion.

Although Orwell is known as an agnostic, he went, as Taylor points out, through a serious phase of Anglican Christianity. This is reflected particularly in the novel The Clergyman’s Daughter. It is a book that reveals a detailed knowledge of a particular kind of high but not Anglo-Catholic church, including a pious member who is always writing polemical letters to the Church Times. What is particularly interesting is the exploration of how the clergy daughter, once so pious, loses her faith.

I suspect that this reflected Orwell’s own experience; but he never lost his sense that there was in British life what he called a common decency, and he thought that this was due to the Christian faith. Orwell loved England and wrote movingly in praise of it. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he wrote that, in working-class homes where the man had a good job, “you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which it is not easy to find elsewhere.”

Read it all.

George Orwell was born on this day in 1903. If you were ever interested in his life and work, this new 2023 updated bio “Orwell: The New Life” by DJ Taylor has everything you’d ever need to know. Very detailed and utilizes new resources. Award winning biographer. #booktwitter pic.twitter.com/jgSZG2NuOr

— A Home Library | Book Reviews (@ahomelibrary) June 25, 2024

‘For many people, the doctrine of the trinity is one of the most baffling areas of Christian theology. How can we think of God as “three persons”? There are many who suspect that this is simply an attempt by theologians to make their subject in accessible to outsiders. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), third President of United States of America was severely critical of what he termed, the “incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic.” Why on earth do we need to speak of God in this convoluted and puzzling way? Might it suggest that theology is thoroughly irrational?

More recently, Christians have become aware of the Islamic critique of the doctrine, which holds that it compromises the unity of God. Many Christians neglected the notion, partly because it was seen as obscure. Karl Rahner remarked that the modern Christians were “almost mere monotheists,” paying lip service to the Trinity in theory, but ignoring it in practice. “We must be willing to admit,” he remarked, “that, should the doctrine of the Trinity have to be dropped as false the major part of religious literature could well remain virtually unchanged.”

—-Alister McGrath, Theology: The Basics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2012), p.116, quoted by yours truly in the later Sunday sermon

We in the #UMC wish you a blessed #TrinitySunday. Holy, holy, holy, Lord God almighty. Early in the morning my song shall rise to thee… pic.twitter.com/weTbz71apF

— United Methodist News (@UMNS) May 26, 2024

I recently heard about the response of one vicar several years ago, upon learning that another had been appointed to lead a Charismatic-renewal ministry: “Congratulations on joining the lunatic fringe.”

In all honesty, I think such descriptions still endure in some quarters, but, in this piece of scholarly theology, Helen Collins seeks to show that Charismatic thought and practice has an important contribution to make to the whole Church.

She neither shies away from the weird excesses of some Charismatic spirituality nor proposes an academic domestication of the Spirit’s work. (There is, for example, a helpful and careful discussion of demons, with an exhortation to “remain Christ-centred rather than demon-obsessed”.) In seven tightly argued chapters, she portrays Charismatic theology “as a valid and coherent expression of the wider Christian tradition”.

Publication Day! We are very excited to announce the publication of Charismatic Christianity by Revd Dr Helen Collins, our Vice Principal (Academic) and Tutor in Practical Theology. Available today in hardback and kindle, and in November in paperback: https://t.co/BwWXcDZDQI pic.twitter.com/62PKIkdPmk

— Trinity College (@trinity_bristol) September 26, 2023

“The Divine Economy” is more tactful than Mr Lehrer—though not quite as much fun. The book’s scope is big. So too, alas, are many of the words. Sentences such as “probabilistic models of cognition assume that human cognition can be explained in terms of a rational Bayesian framework” leave the reader wishing for lines that are, like those in “The Vatican Rag”, a little snappier, while his idea that religions are “platforms” is at times more confusing than clarifying.

An obvious riposte to all this religious analysis is: who cares? It is 2024, not 1524. God, as Friedrich Nietzsche stated, is dead. But such secularist complacency is misplaced and wrong. The West may be less Christian—but the rest of the world is not. Between 1900 and 2020, the proportion of Africans who are Christian rose from under 9% to almost half; the proportion who are Muslim rose from around a third to over 40%.

Even in secular countries, faith remains powerful. In America in 2022, Roe v Wade was overturned thanks, in part, to decades of campaigning by evangelicals and Catholics. Non-believers dabble too. Jordan Peterson, a Canadian academic, performs to stadiums with a talk titled “We Who Wrestle With God” and garnishes his books with statements such as “Our consciousness participates in the speaking forth of Being.” God might wish he were dead when He hears such things. He is not.

Read it all.

One study found that in 2016 American faith-based organisations had revenues of $378bn—more than the revenues of Apple and Microsoft combined.

A new book explains why God may be great, but his full-year results are greater https://t.co/XjOOczvX8g

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) May 14, 2024

George Pattison has devised an original way of evaluating Dostoevsky’s views for our time by letting him “appear” from some post-death state to a somewhat jaded secular academic. This enables Dostoevsky to be questioned not only on his own views, but on how he has been interpreted since then.

It is an imaginative device that could have failed, but, with Pattison, succeeds. He is on top of the literature, and he writes clearly in a way that is accessible to the general reader as well as the academic community. The first half of the book consists of these conversations with Dostoevsky. The second half continues the discussion in a more formal academic way.

For good and ill, Dostoevsky has been hugely influential. In particular, his belief in Russian nationalism was taken up in Nazi Germany, and it lies behind some of Vladimir Putin’s propaganda; for, in The Possessed (also entitled, The Devils, or The Demons), the forces of anarchic secular liberalism are likened to the Gadarene swine, and Putin draws on this trope in affirming traditional Russian values as opposed to the decadent individualism and liberalism of the West.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

Book review: Richard Harries enjoys fresh engagement with Dostoevsky’s thoughthttps://t.co/kwqXEay7Pt

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) May 12, 2024

Renn’s essay categorizes the recent history of evangelicalism in the United States into three periods, or worlds. In the positive world, Christianity was in a position of cultural dominance; most Americans, even those who were not particularly religious, recognized the importance of Christianity to the country’s collective moral fabric. In the neutral world, the broader culture came to see Christianity not as uniquely good, but still as a belief system and worldview doing more good than harm.

Since the early 2010s—the dates themselves, Renn admits, are not binding—evangelicalism has been in the negative world. Here, culture and its elites are inherently suspicious of evangelical Christianity, especially when it challenges or conflicts with emerging, more attractive ideologies. Christians in the negative world, according to Renn, will encounter resistance to previously acceptable beliefs and behaviors. This resistance could take many forms, from simple yet pronounced disagreement all the way to the dreaded C-word: cancellation.

Less than two years after his essay, Renn’s book, Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, updates and elaborates on his framework and provides tangible resources for Christians concerned about this cultural transformation. Renn’s work, he admits, is not pastoral, nor is it necessarily prescriptive. Rather, drawing on his experience in the world of management consulting, he proposes a way forward for American evangelicals wanting to adapt to the new normal in faithful and prophetic ways—that is, to be in the negative world while refusing to be of the negative world.

Read it all.

In his new book, @aaron_renn offers “strategies for theologically conservative evangelicals finding themselves gradually alone in and at odds with the negative world.”@danielrbenn reviews “Life in the Negative World”: https://t.co/iHmlAKZHKC

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) May 11, 2024

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, 10-time All-Star pitcher Clayton Kershaw stood atop the Los Angeles Dodgers dugout and declared his love for Jesus.

Microphone in hand, the future Hall of Famer thanked the thousands of fans — a sea of blue-and-white Dodgers jerseys and T-shirts — who stayed for the postgame program on Christian Faith and Family Day.

“Jesus, thank you so much for this day,” Kershaw said as he led the Dodger Stadium crowd in a prayer. “What an opportunity to get to be here and glorify you and talk about you and how much you mean in our lives. Help us every single day to follow you as best as we can.”

The scene, which I witnessed while reporting on MLB faith nights for Religion Unplugged last summer, reflected the importance of faith in the life of the three-time National League Cy Young Award winner.

“The Last Of His Kind: Clayton Kershaw and the Burden of Greatness,” a new book by Andy McCullough, touts itself as the definitive biography of the Dodgers ace.

Read it all.

“The Last Of His Kind: Clayton Kershaw and the Burden of Greatness,” a new book by @ByMcCullough, touts itself as the definitive biography of the Dodgers ace @ClaytonKersh22.@bobbyross’ Weekend Plug-in highlights five faith takeaways: https://t.co/eZsRrNSckR

— Religion Unplugged (@ReligionMag) May 10, 2024

As so often, McGrath brings his understanding of the natural sciences into creative dialogue with theology. Although the subject matter may seem to be very different, he carefully notes the ways in which theologians and scientists share similar patterns of thought. Among the most important of these is that doctrines, like scientific theorems, are never disengaged, unquestionable abstractions that sort out all our problems for us. Rather, in both fields, the search is for the best explanation that allows for complex and sometimes competing perspectives to remain in view; for a map which draws disparate but interdependent elements into unity without eliding their individual complexity.

The highlight of the book is perhaps the final chapter in which these insights crystallise around a discussion of the doctrine of salvation, which functions as a case study for the approach of the work as a whole. McGrath concentrates on four metaphors for salvation: cultic sacrifice, restoration of wholeness, liberation from bondage, and adoption into a family. There is no single univocal theory of salvation; far less is it an intellectual puzzle. Rather, the New Testament gives us a diversity of images, which, none the less, can helpfully be mapped and woven together, as they are in the author’s expert hands.

Read it all.

In this free chapter from "The Nature of Christian Doctrine: Its Origins, Development, and Function", @alisteremcgrath offers an extended critical assessment of George Lindbeck’s Nature of Doctrine (1984).

Read now: https://t.co/LbLhlQ9uL7 pic.twitter.com/CCmQJDt66w

— OUPReligion (@OUPReligion) April 6, 2024

“The whole world changed colour when I lost Beth,” Mr Palmer says. “People call it devastation: it’s too small a word. I was completely shattered. It was like being smashed to the ground.

“I was a firefighter [at Manchester Airport]. I’d spent years and years dealing with life-and-death situations. I taught trauma to first responders, and was very often on the other end of a defib. But losing my little girl just destroyed me.”

Feeling suicidal himself, he couldn’t talk to his family and couldn’t work, he says. The only thing that got him out of bed in the early days was his dog, Monty, whom he walked in the middle of the night so that he didn’t have to meet people. “I was in an awful place. But little things started happening.”

He felt compelled to write a journal — something that he had never done before — and discovered this to be an outlet for his anger and despair. He asked for help, and found good people in a counsellor, a local suicide-bereavement service, and the airport chaplain, George Lane.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

After his daughter’s death, Mike Palmer became one of ‘3 dads walking’ to raise awareness of young suicide. He talks to Catherine Larnerhttps://t.co/QVcXmHHCMd

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) April 28, 2024