Growing up Southern Baptist, I learned at an early age that God wanted to give me stuff. It was simple. All I had to do was name it and claim it and have faith that God would do his part. For the first half of my “Christian” life, this is how I treated our Lord…
Jesus Is Not Your Boyfriend!
I’ll try to keep this short and sweet as we’ve previously touched on the importance of mindfulness in worship, but we need to address a persistent trend in Christian music that should go the way of the dodo before it’s allowed even a swan song. I’m referring to the ongoing proliferation of lyrics that romanticize…
“The Music Man”: Professor Harold Hill as Anti-Christ
I recently had cause to rewatch The Music Man, seeing as it was the Fourth of July and that timeless classic has always served to remind me of my youth spent in a rural farming community in southeastern South Dakota−a place not so far from Iowa, where every summer day might have been Independence Day…
Bad Robot: The Moral Quandary of Artificial Intelligence
With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in mainstream culture, the futures depicted in TV shows like Black Mirror and films like Ready Player One don’t seem so far off. This pressing reality, coupled with some disturbing behavior recently discovered in AI, has forced leaders of major tech corporations to take a seat at the table and have an open discussion about morality,…
Masturbation: A Christian Woman’s Perspective
Like men, women struggle with pornography and masturbation. But unlike men, women feel alone in confronting these sins. Sermons and statistics tend to focus on men in addressing the issue of pornography and masturbation. This article from Desiring God, though dated, explicitly states its intended audience is male. Not much has changed in the decades…
Deny, Deny, Deny
Peter’s threefold denial of Christ is one of the most well-known Biblical stories and rightly so. Peter’s actions remind us that even as Christians we can sin against God, even in grievous ways, and must be continually turning to Him in repentance. Even face to face with the Messiah, Peter’s faith was not infallible. Today…
“Where the Crawdads Sing”: Natural Does Not Equal Moral
"Where the Crawdads Sing" by wildlife scientist Delia Owens is marketed as an “ode to natural world”, but Owens takes the theme farther than a simple celebration of nature and into the realm of morality. At the heart of the novel is this presupposition: what is natural is inherently moral. Owens’ story follows Kya Clark,…
Protecting the Gospel in Pro-Life Ministry
Pro-life organizations are notorious for their association with the Roman Catholic church. Look no further than the recent popularity of Unplanned, a movie about Abby Johnson’s experience as the former director of a Planned Parenthood clinic and her transition into pro-life ministry. Abby Johnson is not only the new darling of the pro-life movement; she…
A Universe Tuned for Worship
There’s a theory among some theologians that God sang the universe into existence. It’s a beautiful, albeit strange thought, but Biblical scholars weren’t the only ones to look up at the heavens and ponder a musical origin. Centuries ago, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras theorized a concept called “The Music of the Spheres”. Noticing the mathematical precision in…
