The God-Shaped Hole

Haidt has been invited to speak to various Christian organizations and universities and has “found a point of commonality.” “I’m always up front that I’m an atheist,” he explained, “but I say to them: I agree with you that there is a God-shaped hole in everyone’s heart.” That line reflects the sentiments expressed by Saint …

Feed the Hungry

Baylor's Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty is doing an incredible thing, and is just the kind of initiative a Christian research institution should be putting energies behind.

Senseless Arson

The burning of a church in northern Mississippi this week is being investigated as arson because of a spray-painted message at the scene that seemed to criticize the church’s defiance of coronavirus restrictions. First Pentecostal Church had sued the city of Holly Springs, Miss., which is about an hour southeast of Memphis, arguing that its …

The Pluses of Religious Observance

The study neither encourages nor discourages religion, and the research does not bend to favor one faith over another. Regular attendance was the study’s common denominator, no matter whether one was entering a mosque, temple, church or synagogue. But clearly and convincingly, the research found something unique in the faith experience and the communities that cultivate …

Ministers: Process Over Position

Thriving in ministry requires reflection, creativity and adaptability. It requires that we honor the wholeness of who we are by recognizing that our physical health, mental wellness, relational stability and vocational clarity all serve and support our call. When we over-attend to one element to the detriment of the others, it is difficult to thrive. …

COVID-19: Grounds for Discrimination?

Because of the negative connotations that now adhere to the word, perhaps we need to remind ourselves that there’s nothing wrong with discrimination as such. We discriminate all the time, and often quite rightly. We do not treat children as we do adults, nor convicted prisoners as we do innocent citizens. Indeed, in those cases, …

Style is Substance

Proponents of contemporary worship explain that they are not changing the substance, or content of Christian worship, but only updating the style, or form for modern tastes. Rock bands, production pop-tunes, TED Talk sermons, coffee-house vibes, and (fill-in-the latest worship trend here) are, the argument goes, just making Christianity relevant. While seeming harmless, this argument …

Seminary Education is Changing

But times are changing. According to the Association of Theological Schools (ATS), one-third of 2017 graduates planned to enter bivocational minis­try, with 57% of black/non-Hispanic and 41% of Hispanic/Latino gradu­ates declaring bivocational intention. Additionally, in a survey of over 5,000 seminary students, ATS found almost 40% of them intended to use their degrees to serve …

Gen Z Religiosity

In 2008, around one-third of millennials (31.9%) were religiously unaffiliated. Over the next decade, that figure rose more than 10 percentage points to 42.7%, according to data provided by Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University. “Without some type of exogenous shock to disrupt the current patterns of behavior ... it’s difficult to …

Content Collapse

Context collapse remains an important conceptual lens, but what’s becoming clear now is that a very different kind of collapse — content collapse — will be the more consequential legacy of social media. Content collapse, as I define it, is the tendency of social media to blur traditional distinctions among once distinct types of information …