The questionable innocence of Pontius Pilate

Apr 17, 2021 by

The questionable innocence of Pontius Pilate

by Steve Morris, The Critic: David Lloyd Dusenbury is a research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He didn’t expect to be writing this book. Instead he had decided to write a review of another book, Giorgio Agmben’s Pilate and Jesus in 2015. He never got round to writing that review, because the book set him to ask questions. Agmben’s thesis is that Pilate was innocent of blame. Dusenbury decided to find out if he agreed. T Sometimes issues of great secular significance can be...

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Does democracy need Christianity?

Apr 16, 2021 by

Does democracy need Christianity?

by Michael Kirke, MercatorNet: The world before Christ was a savage place. Ancient civilisations were cruel and unforgiving. In this world, despite the benign and wise voices of people like Akhenaten, Zoroaster, Socrates, Cicero and others, Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome placed very little value on human life. Tom Holland’s Dominion and Professor Mary Beard’s S.P.Q.R. – to name but two relatively recent depictions of that world – illustrate the great divide between the values of BC and AD. But...

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Talented Pastors and the Plurality Principle

Mar 27, 2021 by

Talented Pastors and the Plurality Principle

Book: ‘The Plurality Principle: How to Build and Maintain a Thriving Church Leadership Team’ by Dave Harvey. Apple employees coined the term “reality distortion field” to describe Steve Jobs’s ability to twist any fact to fit his own purpose. “At the root of the reality distortion was Jobs’s belief that the rules didn’t apply to him,” Walter Isaacson wrote in his biography. “He had some evidence for this; in his childhood, he had often been able to bend reality to his desires. Rebelliousness...

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God will not be without witnesses

Mar 25, 2021 by

God will not be without witnesses

From CEN: Paul Richardson reviews British Gods: Religion in Modern Britain: Steve Bruce, Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen, is a leading proponent of the secularisation thesis. Religion has been in decline in Britain for 150 years, he argues, and there is little reason to think this process is going to be halted. Religious believers will not find his new book a comforting read but it does have lessons to teach us. Members of the Church of England concerned with evangelism...

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Responding to Transgender Ideology—and censorship

Feb 24, 2021 by

Responding to Transgender Ideology—and censorship

by Ian Paul, Psephizo: I previously posted this review of Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally three years ago, not long after it was first published. I am republishing it again now, because three days ago it appeared that Amazon had delisted it on all its sites around the world. At first I wondered whether there had been a problem with the publisher, or the book had gone out of stock—but in those cases the book page remains with a note ‘Currently unavailable’. In fact, the Amazon page that...

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The Road to Sexual Revolution: Carl Trueman and the Modern Self

Feb 16, 2021 by

The Road to Sexual Revolution: Carl Trueman and the Modern Self

by R J Snell, Public Discourse: According to Carl Trueman, focusing myopically on problems with sexual morality often results in misguided responses to the sexual revolution. Instead, we must grapple with “a much deeper and wider revolution in the understanding of what it means to be a self.” It is beyond doubt that the sexual revolution of the last sixty years has resulted in enormous social changes. Ideas that would have been judged preposterous just a decade ago are now normalized and...

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