It is too early to tell, I think, whether the “wokeness” craze has already peaked and even begun to slip into decline, or whether it’s just pausing to gather energy for another surge. What seems clear for the moment, though, is that it has lost at least some of its initial momentum, probably because it…
Whatever else we might say about the contemporary church, we must say this: We are well resourced. When a new challenge presents itself, when a new teaching arises, when a new heresy appears, it does not take long before we have access to books that address, confront, and correct it. One of the recent challenges…
Do you remember the Emerging Church? Steeped in postmodernism and marked by more than a little progressivism, it rose to prominence in the early naughts and seemed as if it would present a formidable challenge to orthodox Christianity in the new millennium. Many viewed it as a severe threat to the gospel of Jesus Christ.…
I have been spending a fair bit of time researching the topic of social justice—something that has probably become obvious to you if you’re a regular reader of this site. The more I read, the more I see how much of the battle is not merely one of competing ideologies, but of competing vocabularies. John…
I grew up in the era of the Cold War. From my youngest days I was taught that the West was the bastion of democratic freedom and the Soviet Union the stronghold of oppressive totalitarianism. We knew who the enemy was, and we knew he was across the ocean, behind the Wall. On our fridge…
We’ve all heard by now of the rise of the “Nones,” that growing demographic that, when filling out a census, marks their religious affiliation as “None.” While until recently they made up only the smallest minority in America (and the rest of the Western world) they may now come close to forming a majority, especially…
You do not need to be a particularly astute observer of society to understand that we have entered into a time of great transition and even great upheaval. A new worldview based around a very particular conception of social justice is quickly gaining traction. Traditional understandings of sex and gender are being overthrown. New words…
You can’t read the news, you can’t scroll through Twitter, you can’t browse a bookstore, you probably can’t even talk to a neighbor without realizing that somehow everything has become about race, gender, and identity. In a short period of time we’ve been introduced to a whole new vocabulary that conveys a whole new set…