On Thursday, March 30, 2023, the Biblical and Theological Studies department of Providence Theological Seminary will be hosting a panel discussion of the forthcoming book After Dispensationalism: Reading the Bible for the End of the World written by Brian Irwin of Knox College, Toronto along with my colleague Tim Perry. If you’re a Christian in North America there’s a very good chance that you’ve either personally been influenced by dispensationalism or know someone who has. Guests are welcome to join the event in person or on Zoom. You can register for this free event and find out more information here.
“For if faith, as has been said above, is a sure persuasion of the truth of God – that it can neither lie to us, nor deceive us, nor become void – then those who have grasped this certainty assuredly expect the time to come when God will fulfill his promises, which they are persuaded cannot but be true. Accordingly, in brief, hope is nothing else than the expectation of those things which faith has believed to have been truly promised by God. Continue reading Calvin on Faith and Hope→
An important piece by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt arguing that the relationship between the rise of social media and increasing mental illness in teenage girls is not simply a matter of correlation but causation. It’s worth the ten minutes it takes to read.
Below is a recording of a sermon I preached this past Sunday at Prairie Presbyterian Church. My text was John 3:1-21. As I was working on the sermon, I began to notice interesting connections between the story of Nicodemus’s encounter with Jesus and our current cultural struggles surrounding race in North America. The fact that I’ve been reading Jonathan Tran’s insightful book, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism, is also surely a contributing factor. The first part of the sermon is sure to aggravate cultural warriors on the left and the right, but I do think the second half gestures towards a more distinctive Christian approach to this set of problems. Continue reading A Sermon for Black History Month→
“Modernity,” according to Root, “is the constant process of speeding things up.”1 Under the accelerating forces of modernity, human beings and communities are constantly scrambling to keep up with the rapid rate of change, leading to increasing levels of anxiety and depression. Root illuminatingly contrasts change with transformation: Continue reading Root on Transformation vs. Change→
Andrew Root, The Church in a Secular Age: Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2021), 14. ↩
I had a wonderful week last week with the Doctor of Ministry cohort at Providence Theological Seminary teaching a course called, “Thinking and Interpreting Theologically.” The students read several insightful texts in preparation for our time together. The one that seemed to generate the most conversation was Andrew Root’s The Congregation in a Secular Age: Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life(Baker, 2021). It is the third volume in Root’s Ministry in a Secular Age trilogy. In the trilogy Root is dialoguing with the work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, in particular Taylor’s seminal A Secular Age. At the heart of Root’s project is the concern for developing ways for Christians to speak about and recognize the presence of divine action within the midst of a “social imaginary” that has reduced its vision to the “immanent frame.”1Continue reading Performance of Identity→
These are terms Taylor introduces in A Secular Age. I briefly engage with Taylor around some of these themes in For the Life of the World (215-216). ↩
