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Anthony Robinson Should church be fun? Is worship supposed to be a "feel-good" experience? A number of recent experiences have me wondering. At his California Crystal Cathedral, Robert Schuller welcomes the television audience and assembled congregation saying, "This is a church where we can have fun!" When I was in Minnesota recently for a speaking engagement, a pastor told me of his visit to a booming mega-church there in the land of 10,000 lakes. "The whole point," he said, "was…

Steve Mathonnet-VanderWell It is sometimes fun to live in Iowa. Normally, I can come up with many positive adjectives to describe life in a small midwestern town. Fun might not always be one of them. But every four years, we in Iowa become the center of the political universe, and for a political junkie like me, this is fun. More than just fun, the Iowa caucuses have restored my faith in American politics. They have transformed me into an interested,…

Steve Bouma-Prediger If you ever met them, you wouldn't think that Kenneth and Kenny share much more than their names. But even their names are different. No one would ever call Kenneth "Kenny" and "Kenneth" doesn't even appear on Kenny's birth certificate. No, Kenny was Kenny from the beginning. There are, however, a few things they have in common. They are both male, white, and of English descent. And we could say that they are neighbors, although they've never met.…

James K.A. Smith It would be unfortunate if Lilla's The Stillborn God got lost in the shuffle of the burgeoning industryof Theocracy A larmists, Inc. (fronted by the likes of Chris Hedges and Kevin Phillips)--or even worse, lumped in with the screeds of secular fundamentalists like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Unlike these other hapdash offerings to fawning secularist audiences, Lilla's book is winsome, erudite, and engaging. Even critics will have to recognize that this is a stunning book. It…

APRIL 2008: POETRY by Patrick Moran go this wayyou have nothing to lose there are trees there will be a river don't pretend to know their names there will be a farmhouse a light for a traveler it's not for you wait to be seen it will be better this way they will have time to choose time to examine their conscience recall the kindnesses the cruelties it's the story of mouth and eyes it's the story of bodies gathered…

Nicholas Wolterstorff A considerable amount of the work of the twelfth centurycanon lawyers consisted of commenting on passages from the Church Fathers; and in some of the Church Fathers there is unmistakably a recognition of natural human rights. This comes out especially in what the Church Fathers have to say about the status of the poor. Let me quote a passage from a sermon of the great preacher of the Orthodox Church, John Chr ysostom. John preached the sermon in…

Scott Hoezee In my line of work, I think about preaching seven days a week, and for hours on end at that. After a while, someone like me can forget that even churchgoing folks don't ponder preaching nearly so often. And if that's true of regular attenders of public worship, one can only imagine how seldom thoughts about sermons cross the minds of those who rarely (if ever) show up for Sunday services. What's more, most preachers labor in relative…