Sometimes throwaway lines leave a deep impression. One of those were words written on a blog I avidly followed about fifteen years ago. The writer said, “A good man does not love ugly things”. Words like that enabled me to see a profound link and overlap between what is true, good, and beautiful. Real beauty… Continue Reading
What possible value can the study of beauty deliver? Isn’t this fiddling while Rome burns, counting daffodil petals while barbarians lay siege to the city? In times of apostasy, false teaching, deception and darkness, shouldn’t aesthetics go to the bottom of the priority-pile? When caricatured as effete aestheticism, then yes, beauty will seem to be… Continue Reading
The evangelical world has come to make much of the distinction between convictions and preferences. For example, evangelical preacher Andy Stanley recently preached a sermon in which he stated that preferences arise from emotion, while convictions are based on principle; preferences are oriented toward here and now, but convictions are oriented toward the future; preferences… Continue Reading
I am writing on the morning of September 16, 2015. At 3:00 this afternoon, Richard Glossip is scheduled to die. Barring a court-ordered stay, he will be executed by the state of Oklahoma. Governor Mary Fallin has refused to intervene. Glossip has been on death row for eighteen years. He was convicted of planning the… Continue Reading
The incongruity of the past week has been troubling. On the one hand, we have never witnessed more clear and convincing evidence that the institutions of our nation and civilization are under the direction of the wicked. The gatekeepers of the media, of statecraft, of jurisprudence, and of education are clearly committed to an agenda… Continue Reading
I was pushed to write a series on discernment when I heard a famous evangelical pastor define discernment as the ability to see, allegedly by the Spirit of God, obscene things on a kind of imaginary “movie screen.”1 I also wanted to respond with sound exegesis to the opinions of some that any extra-biblical moral… Continue Reading
We are beginning to see that discernment was a significant category for Paul. As an apostle, Paul was very much accustomed to giving the Lord Jesus Christ’s divine instruction to the church for doctrine, worship, and practice. But he was also very much aware that such instruction could in no way satisfy all the moral… Continue Reading