Many of us are somewhat disconnected from history. The recently released Report: Student don’t know much about U.S. history is but one example.

“Just 13 percent of high school seniors who took the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, called the Nation’s Report Card, showed a solid grasp of the subject.”

The study revealed that most students couldn’t identify Martin Luther King Jr or Abraham Lincoln and couldn’t say why they are important. Being somewhat a student of history I can say, I am not overly surprised. Since the 1930s Continue reading …

In fact, a lot of people have liked this book. And isn’t that all that matters? I mean, if you can write in a congenial autobiographical style that makes people feel good by telling them the kinds of things anyone would want to hear, if readers warm up to you the way kids would to a favorite uncle who intrigues them with views different from those of their parents, if you can effectively manipulate the emotional hooks in a story when truth and logic abandon you, does it really matter if your premises are faulty, your facts are few and far between, and the cover of your book is a tad misleading? So what if this book is less than the sum of its parts (much less, actually)! Why can’t we all just be open minded for a change, and if, in the process of opening our minds our brains fall out, so what? If God is bigger than our puny little brains, He shouldn’t care what’s in them, right? So let’s try putting the stuff Philip Gulley and James Mulholland have written in their book, If Grace Is True: Why God Will Save Every Person (San Francisco, CA, USA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003) into them and see what happens. Continue reading …

I became a Christian in the 1970s. This was a challenging and exciting time for me. I hadn’t grown up in the church and was by example (my father) and choice, an atheist prior to being persuaded of the validity and truth of the claims of Christianity. When I became a believer the Jesus movement was in full swing and the era of church trends seems to have been coming into its own. Being a new believer I was vaguely aware of some of the controversies and concerns but only vaguely. I didn’t know enough to know what I didn’t know.

One the one hand, the Jesus Movement was challenging tradition in their evangelism and worship. Long hair, sandals and more contemporary music Continue reading …

From time to time we are MCOI have to stop to reminder ourselves why we are doing what we do. I am particularly reminded when I receive from pastors which say:

Stop attacking everyone! LOVE LOVE LOVE … do you actually ingest the WORD when you read it or is it just a judgement stick for you against all the evil people in the world. You should learn caution against such things you don’t absolutely know. Your anthropomorphistic rhetoric falls apart if you play it out all the way. Maybe Jesus wasn’t really a man maybe the gospels like the rest of the OT is just one giant anthropomorphism

Other times it comes in the form of responses on the blog from Continue reading …