Christians as Peculiar People

You’ve probably seen the much-ballyhooed PRRI survey, a segment of which indicates that white evangelical Christians feel that Christians are more discriminated against than Muslims in the United States. (If you haven’t, you have to scroll down for a while to get to this table.) Other groups interviewed for the survey disagree. I was intrigued by…

“Alternative Facts” and Christian Truth

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the matter of “alternative facts.” While it hasn’t been named in exactly this way before, the phenomenon of “alternative facts” is nothing new. People have always attempted to shape the interpretation of the world around them to their own advantage. The rise of postmodernity and deconstructionism has…

Wesley on Judgment

Lately I’ve been working on a Wesleyan interpretation of Matthew, so I’ve been reading a lot of Wesley, particularly his thirteen discourses on the Sermon on the Mount. Going back through his corpus of sermons reminds me what great treasures they are, and how he always attempts to deal with theological issues in a practical…

The True Meaning of Christmas, According to the Wesleys

This year we will likely hear (or preach ourselves) sermons on the “true meaning of Christmas.” If contemporary Protestantism holds true to form, in many cases this will mean exhortations to be kind, give of ourselves, and do unto others as we would have them do unto us. From a Wesleyan perspective, however, such interpretations of…

Theological Anthropology, FTW

So, it turns out that human beings aren’t simply–to use Stephen Hawking’s term–“chemical scum” after all. A recent article in The Washington Post by Harvard University’s Howard A. Smith argues that human beings are, in fact, “cosmically special.”  According to the article, The universe, far from being a collection of random accidents, appears to be stupendously…