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BIBLICAL MARRIAGE:  DO WE KNOW IT WHEN WE SEE IT?

We are not individuals placed in the world to seek our own pleasure but members of a community bound together in love, which finds one of its highest and fullest expressions in marriage and the family. In our intimate relationships, as in larger settings such as the church, we should show love and respect and live in mutual submission to each other.
December 4, 2023
Featured

The Reformation According to Janet

As Janet spoke, though, it came to me again that religion mangles the Gospel sometimes. It had, for example, taught both Janet’s and Chester’s parents a harsh script, and they had acted it out; it was Janet who bore the spiritual pain of that bad teaching.
November 27, 2023
Featured

Children Entering the Kingdom

One Israelite tradition, the dominant one, held that wisdom came with the experience of years and that the elders bore the responsibility of codifying and passing it on to children. ... The other tradition held that wisdom resided in children who saw the world afresh and often had a keener sense of God’s presence and purposes than their elders.
November 20, 2023
Featured

A Reformed Theological Case for Same-Sex Marriage

Too often the debate over same-sex marriage is reduced to trying to sidestep a few tangential passages or throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. Instead, we need a comprehensive Reformed theology of marriage that honors the full arc of Scripture from creation to eschaton.
November 13, 2023
Featured

Look Where She Comes From

I don’t have a career. Most of my jobs have included me having to run the checkout, and sweeping and mopping the floor at the end of the night. My husband doesn’t have a college education or a career. He’s what is referred to as a cement dweller. He goes to a factory and spends his days standing on a cement floor bending and twisting metal all day. We don’t own a large house—up until a year earlier, we were…
November 6, 2023
ChurchFeatured

Digging In and Bailing Out: Religion, Politics, and the Rise of the Nones: Part Two

To understand the rise of the Nones, it is necessary to consider the broader cultural impact of the rise of the Religious Right in producing a broad backlash, but it is equally important to explore how these processes operate at a congregational level in which people who have worshiped together for generations find themselves having to make the difficult choice of leaving a congregation that has been an important part of their and their family’s identity.
October 23, 2023
ChurchFeatured

Digging In and Bailing Out: Religion, Politics, and the Rise of the Nones: Part One

While conservative Christians are circling the wagons calling for a commitment to core values and practices that map well to key Republican priorities, politically moderate and liberal Christians are rushing to find the exits. The result is a growing divide between more ideologically pure conservative Christian communities on one side and a more secular, more liberal group on the other, many of whom do not identify with any religious tradition. Having explored these trends, sociologists and other scholars have concluded…
October 16, 2023
EssayFeatured

The Mourner’s Bench

Cancer doesn’t care who or what you are. Speak all your evidence, demand all your rights and entitlements, share your unfulfilled dreams. And be prepared for silence. Cancer isn’t listening.
October 9, 2023