“Postmoderns are remarkably nonchalant about the meaninglessness which they experience in life. Reading the works of an earlier generation of writers, existentialist authors like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, one almost developed a sense of vertigo, the kind of apprehension that one gets when standing too near the edge of a terrifying precipice, so bleak,

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The world we inhabit affects us in many ways. It impacts the way we think about everything, including religion. It has been suggested that the sacred is migrating. Under contemporary conditions, individuals have grown leery of externalities. Our world seems fragmented, tumultuous, and inhospitable. Despite all our comforts and conveniences, our souls groan. Peter Berger

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Roughly 2,000 years ago a religious leader in Jerusalem named Nicodemus was confronted with a baffling statement. Jesus had told him that in order to see the kingdom of God he had to be “born again.” He wondered how this was possible. “Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”

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Language has come on hard times.  In philosophy, many thinkers have questioned its reliability. In the media, there has been a shift in the way language is used. In just the short time since Pearl Harbor, the vocabulary used in reporting has been dumbed-down.  John McWhorter’s book, Doing Our Own Thing, documents these changes taking

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Are you a church looking for a pastor? Are you an individual wondering if God might be calling you to ministry? Consider these thoughts from Kevin DeYoung.

I am currently completing a PhD in theology from Durham Univ. (England). The degree has been a challenge on a number of levels. I remember the relief of simply entering the program and going through orientation. After months of GRE tests and practice tests, hours of browsing different university websites in the US, Canada  and

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The professionalization of the pastorate has been taking place for some time now. David Wells has traced it back to the nineteenth century (see No Place For Truth). John Piper has written a remedy to this trend of professionalization in his book, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals. Not mincing words, Piper states, “We pastors are

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When Tyler Jones stood on a platform in Raleigh, N.C. earlier this year and declared that the churches in the Bible belt were dying and a vibrant evangelical witness no longer dominated America’s Southeast region, he downright angered many who heard (and later read) his words. Yet, if the statistics are correct, more churches have

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As the familiar tale has it, the professor of a Philosophy 101 class enters the classroom to administer the final exam. Stepping silently to the blackboard, he writes there the one-word question “Why?” Turning to the class, he says, “Here is your exam question. Write.” There is, as well, the persistent image of the toddler,

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In a recent Mars Hill Audio Journal interview, Dallas Willard speaks about his book, Knowing Christ Today.  Willard believes that religious knowledge has been nudged outside of public discourse and deemed invalid and irrelevant. This elbowing of religious knowledge out from the public square has been occurring since the mid to late nineteenth century. And,

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