Postcards from Palookaville

A number of good new books have landed on my desk over the last few weeks. John Macleod, Scottish Theology in relation to Church History . These are lectures given at Westminster Theological Seminary in 1939. They have been available for man years but are republished here with a new foreword by Ian...

Perhaps six days is a little short for an accidental feminist retrospective, but, given the feedback Aimee and I have received for our two posts on John Piper, the time seems ripe for such. Some cheered us for speaking out against the increasingly patriarchal sounds coming from leading...

Yesterday my fellow Spinblogger, Aimee Byrd, offered a penetrating and welcome critique of the advice given by John Piper to an inquiry about whether it was legitimate for women to serve as police officers. She cited this passage in particular as problematic: At the heart of mature manhood is a...

Karl Marx commented that history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. When it comes to ministerial falls, sadly the tradition today is to go straight to farce. Thus it is with Tullian Tchividjian’s fall and rise. All of the celebrity conventions are there: The use of...

Over at First Things , a Lutheran pastor has offered a critique of Gerhard Forde's Lutheran theology and connected it to the recent fall of Tullian Tchividjian. Mark Jones has offered a measured response at Reformation21 . Both articles make good points. Tchividjian's understanding of...

Dave Moore has an excellent post on the selective outrage of evangelicals over gay marriage. Here is the core of his argument: " We believe homosexuality is a sin. We also believe that gluttony, gossip, adultery, sex outside of marriage, racism, unscrupulous business practices, the love of...

Thanks to a lead from my favourite magazine, Private Eye , I found this conference online. The prize for the title which packs more gibberish per inch than any other has to go to Daniel Massie (The Robert Gordon University), for ‘Jaws: The Case of the Archetypal American Villain as Queer...

I was reminded by events elsewhere yesterday how much I rely on my elders. The task of the elder is to pastor the pastor. If they do not do it, nobody else will. That means there will be times when the elder has to confront his pastor because he sees that his teaching, or his life, or maybe both,...

Paul Helm has an interesting piece critiquing the critics of megapastordom over at his blog, Helm’s Deep. Three things require a brief response. First, it is clear that Paul does not understand how discipline in a Presbyterian context should work. In actual fact, disciplinary charges need not...

While Aimee was off not doing stairs and trying to become a female Bond villain, on Tuesday the rest of Team Spin was refreshing the parts ot the theological world which other, more transformational, evangelical organizations cannot reach. Day Two of the Yale seminar was somewhat more sedate than...