Hi and welcome back! Lately, we’ve been reading and reviewing Frank Peretti’s 1986 novel This Present Darkness. To say the very least, this book’s a slow burn! But now that we’re past the halfway mark, things are finally picking up steam. Read more
Pastoral restoration involves punishing and humiliating a male evangelical leader enough to mollify the flocks. Both parties seek to ease the scandal-causer back into pastoring without the flocks freaking out and rejecting him (or it blowing up into a public-relations nightmare for the denomination).
Hi and welcome back! As I look back at the carnage of our recent book review of The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, I’m struck by something its author, Ronald J. Sider, does to give himself a tiny little ray of Read more
Now, fifteen years later, let’s see how well Ronald J. Sider’s suggestions went. How many leaders took his suggestions? How’d that go? Has his corner of the Christianity sandbox improved since then — or not? Today, let’s check out the legacy of The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience.
Hello and welcome back! Lately, we’ve been talking about a 2005 book by Ronald J. Sider, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience. With its publication, its author hoped to spur evangelicals into pretending to care about their own rules. We’ve covered Read more
Hi and welcome back! Lately, we’ve been reviewing a classic 2005 evangelical book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience. In it, author Ronald J. Sider tried his darndest to convince evangelicals to start obeying their own rules. In this installment, I’ll Read more
Recently, we encountered Ronald J. Sider’s 2005 evangelical classic, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience. In it, the author explored what he viewed as evangelicals’ signal failure: their utter unwillingness even to pretend to care about what Jesus told them to do during their finite lifetimes. However, Sider offered a downright galaxy-brained solution to this terrible problem. Indeed, he was completely positive that this solution would totally fix everything. Yes, truly! Today, I’ll show you how Ronald J. Sider totally and permanently solved the problem of evangelical hypocrisy through the simple magic of authoritarianism.
In this installment, Marshall Hogan rushes off to rescue Ted Harmel, the previous owner of his newspaper, from whatever’s terrifying him so much. Today, Lord Snow Presides over evangelicals’ conceptualization of demonic attacks in This Present Darkness.
Years and years ago, some Mormon missionaries tried to sell my then-husband Biff on a Heavenly upgrade. And his reaction flummoxed them completely. Today, let me show you how those missionaries’ efforts backfired on them.
As long as evangelical leaders like Ronald J. Sider push Hell-belief, there’s no way believers will ever care about pursuing that Jesus lifestyle. In fact, it’s why their entire flavor of Christianity is marked more by hypocrisy than by adherence to their rules. Today, I’ll show you how Hell-belief leads to hypocrisy, and more importantly, why it always will.