Evangelicals and Catholics (Mostly) Together

Here, in a recent number of First Things, itself a place of conversation between evangelicals and Catholics, is a special recent initiative of evangelical-Catholic dialogue, namely, a response to the pope’s important recent writing, Caritas in Veritate.

The response is offered on behalf of “evangelicals,” but it has arisen largely on the initiative  of some Christian Reformed individuals and groups (a tradition which, let’s gratefully acknowledge, has done a lot of the serious thinking on behalf of evangelicals at large). Your servant is one of the signatories, as are a number of friends and my Regent colleague Prof. Paul Williams.

A Scientist Who Believes in God! That’s Real News!

Well, no, it isn’t. But with Francis Collins being named head of the National Institutes of Health by President Obama, a number of media seem to think it is.

Your servant’s brief riposte is here.

(Your servant’s previous post on “creation versus evolution” is here. And my semi-celebration of Darwin’s birthday is here.)

Chris Tomlin’s Worship Songs: We Have Got to Do Better

Since I have been complaining about loud music in church, I’ll stay in the groove and complain now about bad lyrics in church. And I have a particular songwriter in mind, probably the most popular one nowadays, to stand in for all the rest.

There’s no doubt that Chris Tomlin can write “hook-y” tunes. Many of them stay with you after church, even if you want them badly to go away.

And why would you want them to go away? Partly because some of them are musical clichés. Alas, I lack the technological ability to argue this case using musical samples via this blog. So I’ll have to settle for what I can talk about here: the frequently discomfiting lyrics.

Does TV Simply Preclude Good Preaching?

The news this week is that the struggle between Robert Schuller père et fils continues to diminish the ministry that has made them both famous. Donations and viewer numbers are dropping and it is not clear that the long-running “Hour of Power” will have the fortitude to last another year.

All over America, in fact, televangelism seems to be in trouble — at least among the big boys. And that trouble likely won’t trouble most readers of this blog, since I daresay most of you aren’t big fans of television preaching anyway.

But as the old lions pass off the scene and either put their sons in charge (or, in the case of Canadian David Mainse, their daughter) or dismiss them from their roles as heirs apparent, we might pause to consider this question: Has there ever been any really good preaching on television?

Christians and the Public Good

Can Christian organizations insist that their employees believe Christian doctrines and practice Christian ethics? Not as often as they used to, and not as often as you might think they should be able to. The Ontario courts are considering a case of giant judicial implications as they decide whether Christian Horizons, an organization that cares for the mentally handicapped in group homes and other facilities, can insist that its employees share its Christian profession and practice.

They’re in trouble because one of their employees “came out” as a lesbian in a sustained relationship and complained to the Human Rights Commission when Christian Horizons terminated her after reminding her that she had said she would conform to their conservative Christian ethical standards. Despite what she had promised, she now felt ill treated. A commissioner mostly agreed with her grievance, and his finding was so sweeping that Christian Horizons has appealed to the courts.

Read what the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s Centre for Research on Canadian Evangelicalism (full disclosure: I’m their senior advisor) has to say on this and topics related to the question of what public good is accomplished by churches and other Christian organizations.

What do you think? Should Christian organizations (our American cousins treat this matter as the question of “faith-based initiatives”) be free to hire only Christians? Even if they serve non-Christians? Even if they get public funding? No matter what work they do?

(As a bonus on this site, you’ll find an article in which your servant takes yet another kick at the perennially available can of defining evangelicalism, this time in relation to fundamentalism. But it’s not as interesting as the other stuff.)

When Is a Conservative (Evangelical) Not a Conservative?

(I know I just wrote I have to sign off until the New Year, but I just can’t help myself this morning…)

Over the last several decades, many North American evangelicals have had to fight hard to be understood as not necessarily politically conservative just because they were theologically conservative. I remember a prominent Canadian evangelical leader telling reporters that evangelicals were aligning with right-wing politics because they were “conservative.” But that was to connect two quite different categories: There is no logical connection between conservative Christian faith and conservative contemporary politics.

A couple of American presidential elections ago, journalists were shocked—shocked!—to find some evangelicals who were voting Democratic. Jim Wallis had a brief moment in the sun as Exhibit A, although if journalists had paid attention to black evangelicals, they wouldn’t have been so surprised at evangelicals aligning with Democratic politics.

The “conservative/liberal” labeling is more complicated still, however.

A Research Breakthrough in Canadian Evangelicalism

It has been my honour to help guide the new Centre for Research on Canadian Evangelicalism (CRCE), a venture of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.

The CRCE sponsors research, publishes its own journal (Church & Faith Trends), and helps journalists and researchers understand evangelicals better.

Now the CRCE has established a research tool  that, I believe, is unprecedented anywhere in the world. (Tell us, though, if there are other such tools.) It is a bibliography on Canadian evangelicalism that has been established using wiki technology. Only scholars can register to contribute (and we hope everyone in that category will do so), but anyone can use it.

This tool should save people hours, if not days, of research time. So visit the site if such research interests you, and please expand it if you have expertise to offer.

And congratulations to project manager Rick Hiemstra who put it together with help from EFC’s IT experts.

American Evangelicals and Politics

I discuss a number of recent books by American evangelicals on politics in Christianity Today magazine here. I also take some time to reflect on more general questions of how Christian faith properly interacts with political engagement

Caption Contest

This is a Very Serious Blog—at least, it is most of the time. But every once in a while, we take a walk outside and have a little fun.

While I was lecturing recently in New Brunswick, I had a photograph taken of me just outside the room in which I was speaking. Many people in the audience didn’t understand why I was delighted to have that picture taken, since the Bay of Fundy, home of world-famous tides, was all around the peninsula on which the hotel stood.

But many of you know why I wanted such a photo. And now I am asking you to amplify my joy by suggesting captions to the following pic. Behave yourselves now . . . but not scrupulously, okay? Here goes:

PROVIDE A CAPTION FOR THIS PHOTO:

Sarah Palin and the (White) Evangelical Binary Mind

The question I set before myself today is the one I threw out a few days ago to y’all, namely, what does it say about American evangelicals that the vice-presidential candidacy of Gov. Sarah Palin has been described as “galvanizing” them. So here are a few thoughts about that.

Let’s start with the observation that evangelicals tend toward a binary mind (as historians Mark Noll, George Marsden, and others have delineated in detail). Some things are appropriately thought of in binary terms, to be sure: “Jesus is Lord,” “Ye must be born again,” and so on. But the world of politics is the world of assessing a situation and making the best of it with what, and whom, you have to work with. Binary thinking rarely helps get anything done, because politics rarely presents an actual choice between Good and Evil. More specifically, political campaigns never present a choice between Jesus and Satan.

So this year evangelicals were torn between some impressive candidates who also have impressive drawbacks, as well as a few whose candidacy was unlikely to appeal to more than a minority–pretty much the usual situation in American presidential contests. Why, then, didn’t evangelicals seem to get involved much until recently?

If Sarah Palin Is What It Takes to Galvanize American Evangelicals…

…well, what else is there to say?

At Last: An “Evangelical Manifesto” That Doesn’t Punch Someone in the Face

A few correspondents have asked me what I think of the new “Evangelical Manifesto,” recently released by a group of evangelical leaders (including—full disclosure—some friends of mine).

Another friend, Prof. Alan Jacobs of Wheaton College, grumps in the Wall Street Journal about how boringly moderate it is, among other sins. But let’s just see if that’s such a bad thing.

The nice people at Merriam-Webster tell us that “manifesto” means “a public declaration of intentions, motives, or views: a public statement of policy or opinion.” Jacobs wants the writing to be “punchy” and the document to be “short,” although he recalls that the most famous manifesto ever, the communist one, amounts to a small book.

Still, this one is twenty pages, and when I read it, I wondered why anyone would care what I thought about it. It strikes me as completely sensible, moderate, intelligent, a bit wordy here and there, and kinda dull.

And isn’t that a pleasant change!