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When I first read the Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens "new atheist" argument--that all religions are "dangerous" (as well as false)--I thought: these guys are ill-informed. To counter their stories of religion's horrors we have stories of religion's heroes--from the anti-slavery movement's leaders to the founders of universities, hospitals, and hospices. Moreover, we now have massive new social science data showing religion's associations with human happiness, health, and helpfulness. And thus was born the impulse to pen A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists:…

The judgment spoken by the prophet Amos sets the stage for Matthew Boulton's provocative theological study of worship. God's exhortation, "Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen" (Amos 5:23) lays bare the spiritually dangerous character of worship, for all too often religious acts are nothing more than prideful acts of self-justification. While it is certainly true that faith presumes a loving commitment to God before it undertakes critical…

The scripture says that Christians should bear one another's burdens. Why? I realize that may be a heretical thought to have while sitting in church, but still, it is a good question. I have enough stuff in my life. Bearing another's burden is extra stuff in this era of efficiencies, cut backs, and downsizing. Everyone should take care of their own is the adopted philosophy. Don't political parties expect to win votes with that argument? The next time I hear…

  Over the next several issues, Perspectives will be presenting "church reviews." These reviews are intended to give a glimpse into what is happening in Reformed churches across North America. We have selected a wide variety of congregations within the broader Reformed tradition to be reviewed. Some are "tall-steeples," others obscure. Some may be avant-garde, while others archetypal. A review is meant to be more light-hearted than mean-spirited. No congregation is going to receive a hatchet-job or "three stars out…

Good morning passengers; a service of Christian, Protestant worship will begin in twenty minutes in Sojourners' chapel. The invitation echoed down each elevated concourse, every traveler given notice of divine, heavenly worship, materializing just steps away from them. In twenty minutes time, the airport would become holy ground. Unfortunately, the public address system, now thirty-one years old, translated the message into its own exotic tongue: goo mooing pissers, a cervix of Chrizjan Prostate wooship will begin in tawny minarets in…

With excitement we unlocked the front door of our house. Not a house owned by the church, in which we were invited to make our home. No, this house was ours (or at least we and the bank owned it together). After eighteen years living in manses, this was what we wanted: to buy a house of our own. A variety of names identify the churchowned houses in which ministers and their families live: manse, rectory, parsonage. Over the past…

William Jennings Bryan, if he is known at all these days, is remembered as a buffoon, the fundamentalist opponent of Clarence Darrow in the famous Scopes trial as depicted by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee in their (screen)play, Inherit the Wind. But that picture of Bryan is dreadfully inaccurate, and Michael Kazin has written this fine biography "to gain a measure of respect for Bryan and his people." Quoting historian E. P. Thompson, he would "rescue from the enormous…