Postcards from Palookaville

Just over a year ago I received an email from one of the Top Men, giving me the routine lecture about how my criticisms of him, his organization, and the culture which he had helped to foster amounted to mocking the work of God and taking a sinful delight in the struggles of the godly. So far so...

The Witherspoon Institute has posted a fine article on parenting LGBT children. You can find it here .

In a seminar last week on Martin Luther, I commented that a theologian of glory could easily use the theology of cross for his own ends. He would thereby utterly subvert its purpose while still using its form. This provoked some discussion and even some resistance from my students but the point is...

Our Man in Ulster has just brought this 2014 news story to my attention, about a woman charged with assault for taking meth while pregnant. Setting aside the obvious legal issue about the personhood of a baby in the womb in a nation where abortion is allowed by law, the prize for most astounding...

Another evangelical megachurch congregation has come out in favour of same sex marriage. This time it is GracePointe Church in Nashville, TN. The evangelical collapse is coming. A set of circumstances is conspiring to make it so. The external pressure is easy to identify: the sentiment, the...

One aspect of Thomas Oden’s life which is both admirable and perplexing is his denominational loyalty. Oden is a United Methodist and it is clear from his autobiography that he is committed to his church and perhaps even optimistic that she might be rescued from all the liberal nonsense with...

As readers will know, this week MoS is focusing on Thomas Oden's autobiography, A Change of Heart . As I have reviewed it for the January edition of First Things , I asked Scot McKnight, as a friend and representative of another stream of evangelical life, to offer his thoughts on the volume,...

One of the striking features of Thomas Oden’s spiritual life is his expansive intellectual appetite, evidenced in both his reading and his writing. From his early liberal passion for radical theological and political literature to his later development of the notion of paleo-orthodoxy, Oden...

This week, the blog and podcast is going to focus on Thomas Oden, specifically his delightful memoir, A Change of Heart . Now, one of the key contributions of Thomas Oden to evangelical life was his involvement in 'Evangelicals and Catholics Together.' I will be reflecting on this over at...

The other evening over dinner, a young Roman Catholic friend asked me if I thought evangelicalism would hold firm on gay marriage. I told him I thought a major collapse in the consensus was imminent and also speculated that he would see a similar thing occurring among un-catechized Roman Catholics...