Slowly, I’m working through the posts in our archive library like the Lone Ranger: Riding into town one day, fixing all its problems, and riding back out to the sunset afterward. I’ve got about 2200 posts to fix, and I’ll get to them all in time!
I’ve been coming into contact with a lot of different ideas about apologetics itself as a field. One of the more intriguing of those ideas comes from Myron Penner, a Christian who wrote a book called The End of Apologetics. He did an interview with a blogger when the book came out, and the reactions to that interview were so fascinating that I wanted to show them to you.
Permadeath is a gaming term that means that once a character dies, that’s it: they’re gone forever. I still remember the first time I ever heard about it and played a game that featured it. And life sure does look different–and better–when one looks at it from a permadeath perspective.
One of the weirdest practices you’ll ever encounter among right-wing Christians has to be “speaking in tongues.” I strongly suspect that more people know about snake handling than know about speaking in tongues—and for a reason. So here’s a guide to this wild fundamentalist practice!
There really are two types of Christian in this world, and one of them hates the other with every fiber of its hate- and rage-filled little body.
Logical Christians care a lot more about being correct and soothing that cognitive dissonance than they do about anything their Savior is supposed to have actually told them to do. And now they’ve got metaphysics to do that with.
Given the demonization done of ex-Christians and atheists, given how little most folks–especially fundagelical parents–know about either group, given how poorly most Christian denominations understand real love, I can totally get why parents might worry about the state of their kids’ spiritual health. It’s misplaced, but it’s still there.
One group of Christians, however, is finally coming to grips with their own drop in numbers. They might have the wrong explanation for it and the most nonsensical way possible of dealing with it, but they’re at least dimly aware that their denomination is starting to falter. That group is the Southern Baptist Convention, who recently declared that their denomination is facing a “baptism drought.” Today we’ll talk about why they’re facing it, and why they think they are, because those are two different things.
I was shocked to see it worded like that, like it was some kind of done deal that everybody, “even the rather skeptical ones,” knows. But the fact that she’d put the phrase in quotes like that meant, ostensibly, that she’d gotten it from somewhere. So I went digging. And I found out a lot of stuff that Christians like her probably wouldn’t ever want their kids to learn.
Our journey into both love and that happy land of books you really should have read by now and if you haven’t, then you should definitely consider it continues today with The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle. In this book, the author plays with narratives about love. He gently teases them, toys with them, and ultimately honors them.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people were praying for Daniel’s recovery from brain cancer. He was one of the Big Name Fans in our denomination; we had ties to mission churches all over the world as well. I was one of the people who spent quite some time on her knees praying for Daniel’s recovery. Even Biff, who very rarely prayed anywhere but in church, prayed for him. We were absolutely convinced that God would heal him. Why wouldn’t he?