Pastor Patrick Wiedemeier of Anchor Point Baptist Church in Webster City, Iowa prayed at Saturday night’s Trump rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa. You can watch his prayer at the 1:40.51 mark of this YouTube video. Pastor Wiedemeier starts by reading...
Kingdom of God
Sean Feucht continues to confuse the Kingdom of God with the United States of America
We blogged about this over the weekend. Sean is still at it. This time he is in Austin (the second video is from Feucht’s Tulsa comments, the one we wrote about over the weekend). In Christian theology the “King” is...
N.T. Wright on Easter
Happy Easter!...
Teaching Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens”
This post is a revised version of a post that originally appeared at The Way of Improvement Leads Home on March 4, 2020: Last week we wrapped-up the “Creation” unit in Created and Called for Community. I began the class with...
Teaching Tolkien’s “Leaf By Niggle”
Yesterday I tweeted: Several of you have asked me about how I teach Leaf by Niggle. Here is a piece I published here last year: Yesterday in Created and Called for Community (CCC) we read and discussed J.R.R. Tolkien’s short story “Leaf...
How to pray: a review of Justo Gonzalez’s *Teach Us to Pray: The Lord’s Prayer in the Early Church and Today* (Part 2)
Read this entire review series here. What does it mean when we pray “hallowed be They name?” In his book, Teach Us to Pray: The Lord’s Prayer in the Early Church and Today, church historian Justo Gonzalez explains the meaning of...
The Liberty University *Falkirk Center” shows its theocratic tendencies
The Falkirk Center at Liberty University published a very revealing tweet over the weekend: My response: P.S. They also misspelled Roosevelt and “its” in the second tweet in this screenshot. Both of these tweets were deleted, but several of the...
Springsteen’s “House of 1000 Guitars”
Letter to You is here. My favorite song so far is “House of 1000 Guitars”: I am sure people will interpret this song in different ways, but my interpretation starts with Springsteen himself. Here is a taste of Brian Hiatt’s...
Amy Coney Barrett and the “Kingdom of God”
Notre Dame Law School professor Amy Coney Barrett is on Donald Trump’s short list to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Trump met with Barrett yesterday. Back in September 2017, I called your attention to political philosopher Bill McCormack’s piece at America....
Who’s afraid of critical race theory?
Donald Trump has turned Critical Race Theory (CRT) into a campaign issue in the hopes of winning white evangelicals and other conservatives who fear that an academic theory that they know little about is somehow threatening American democracy. Between his...
Wednesday Night Court Evangelical Roundup
Since my last update, a few things have changed in court evangelical land. Neil Gorsuch, one of two Donald Trump Supreme Court nominees, has defended LGBTQ rights and has proven he may not be the best court evangelical ally when...
Three Sundays in April (Part 4)
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOxuBs5sR_s&w=560&h=315] If you had thirty minutes to say something to the most powerful man in the world, what would you say? This is how I started our short series titled “Three Sundays in April.” On April 19, 2020, the...
What Should We Make of Ralph Reed’s “Christian Case” for Trump?
GOP political operative Ralph Reed recently appeared on the Eric Metaxas Show. Watch: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cPB72BA9s0&w=560&h=315] Thoughts: 2:45ff:Â The interview begins with a discussion of the quarantine. Reed seems to be making a case that coronavirus deaths and the shut-down of...
Three Sundays in April (Part 3)
If you had thirty minutes to say something to the most powerful man in the world, what would you say? This is how I started our short series titled “Three Sundays in April.” On April 12, 2020, Donald Trump watched...
Three Sundays in April (Part Two)
If you had thirty minutes to say something to the most powerful man in the world, what would you say? This is how I started our short series titled “Three Sundays in April.” On April 5, 2020, Donald Trump announced...
CREATE!: Teaching Tolkien’s “Leaf By Niggle”
Yesterday in Created and Called for Community (CCC) we read and discussed J.R.R. Tolkien’s short story “Leaf by Niggle.” Here is a summary of the plot from Wikipedia: In this story, an artist, named Niggle, lives in a society that...
The Kingdom of God in American History
Ralph Keen is writing for us this week from the annual meeting of the American Society of Church History in New York City. Keen is Arthur J. Schmitt Foundation Chair of Catholic Studies and Professor of History at the University...
Not All “Two Kingdom” Christians Ignore the Government’s Unethical Behavior
People like Robert Jeffress give “two-kingdom” theologians a bad name. (Get up to speed here). Even if one embraces the idea that the Sermon on the Mount or the Great Commission should not dictate government policy, Christians are still required...
This Week’s Patheos Column: America, a Great and Flawed Nation
Of all the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson is the most complex. He was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence—the document that declared that we are “endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, namely life, liberty and the...