Last year, we briefly touched on the concept of ‘negative world’ in Christianity. It’s the idea that modern American/Western society now feels hostile toward Christianity rather than neutral or even positive toward it. Of late, though, the concept has gotten attention from some secular news outlets. So today, let’s explore Read more
As I researched the Anglican Church’s ongoing sex abuse crisis, a secondary story about organizational power emerged. It illustrates the gulf between an organization’s leaders and its followers—and how those leaders must be much more careful than they think about how their behavior comes off to followers. This story pairs Read more
Authoritarian Christian leaders really do not like dissenters, do they? Today, let’s check out why.
One thing I noticed quickly was that nobody on Capitol Hill really seemed all that surprised that his time in the sun finally got here. Nobody should be surprised at all about this whole thing. After all, Matt Gaetz is an evangelical in a deeply dysfunctional religio-political tribe. Thus, he speaks the language of power in broken systems. Today, let me decode that language to show you how absolutely unsurprising his behavior really is.
Recently, I spotted this story from Cheat Sheet about a TV show called 90-Day Fiance. In it, an unpopular star repeatedly calls his ex-girlfriend ‘sweetheart’ in one of this show’s ‘tell-alls.’ And the show’s fans exploded in outrage. They were right to take offense at his use of this pet name. If a target’s Read more
If you ever found yourself teetering on the fence about this religion, then this post is for you—because that problem and Thom Rainer’s solutions to it are both dealbreakers
We’ve been talking lately about the early history of Christianity and how different it is from the history offered up by most Christian apologists and leaders. This definitely is not a history I learned growing up Catholic or as a fundamentalist lass! If anything, it’s even more fascinating to me than Read more
Its evangelists competed hard for followers and resources in a culture marked by a huge diversity of beliefs and gods. Because its leaders completely lacked the power to coerce people into joining and staying Christian, however, it wasn’t making that much progress. It would take a series of events in the fourth century to bring it not only to legitimacy, but dominance.
One of the biggest ways that overzealous Christians reveal that their religious grandstanding is, well, just a pretendy fun-time game is in how they publicly talk about and engage in prayer. One of the very last things they should be doing is letting that fact slip to the rest of us–but they show us, in so many ways, exactly how little they themselves believe the words they say. Here is one major way that we can tell that Christians don’t have much faith at all in prayer.