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A bidding prayer for Christmas, A. D. 2023
Edited from the version originally published on December 25, 2012 Merry Christmas to anyone who happens by BatesLine today. This Advent (2023) I renewed an earlier attempt to turn the 4-arm, 5-globe reproduction Victorian streetlamp in front of our house into a kind of Advent candelabra. I installed three purple...
Resources on believers' baptism
A rain-filled mikveh (ritual immersion pool) at Korazim National Park, Israel. Photo © 2023 by Michael D. Bates, all rights reserved. Here are a couple of useful resources that I recently encountered, one very old, one new, in support of the view that Christian baptism is for those only...
A bidding prayer for Christmas, A. D. 2022
Edited from the version originally published on December 25, 2012 Merry Christmas to anyone who happens by BatesLine today. As a Holland Hall high school student, I attended and sang in the annual service of Christmas lessons and carols at Trinity Episcopal Church, modeled after the annual Christmas Eve service...
A bidding prayer for Christmas, A. D. 2020
Edited from the version originally published on December 25, 2012 Merry Christmas to anyone who happens by BatesLine today. As a Holland Hall high school student, I attended and sang in the annual service of Christmas lessons and carols at Trinity Episcopal Church, modeled after the annual Christmas Eve service...
Charles Spurgeon resources
Recently I've returned to the habit of reading a book before bedtime and when eating on my own, leaving aside the digital device and focusing my attention on the printed page. In the past few weeks I've finished Calvin Coolidge's autobiography, Arnold Dallimore's biography of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, a short...
New hymnal: <em>Hymns to the Living God</em>
Religious Affections Ministries has published a new hymnal, and it's available for free download. Hymns to the Living God is notable for its slim size and the scarcity of copyright notices. Only 294 hymns were selected for inclusion, and nearly all of them are in the public domain. Scott Aniol,...
Christian parenting: Immunizing against baptized liberalism, training the mind and the sentiments, and the call to heroism
One of the biggest fears of any Christian parent is that his child will abandon the faith in which he was raised once he's away from home. Some charismatic peer or professor will attempt to convert him to a new religion, which could be anything from a different branch of...
Benedict Option in Oklahoma
Oklahoma's Clear Creek Abbey and the lay community growing around it are featured in a recent story about the "Benedict Option" -- an approach to living faithfully in Christian community as the broader culture transitions from being supportive of and accommodating to Christianity to being hostile and aggressive. The term...
Evangelical virtue signaling on racism
Derryck Green, an African-American writer currently pursuing his doctorate in theology and ministry, has written several recent columns at JuicyEcumenism critical of the way certain evangelical groups are falling all over themselves to embrace #BlackLivesMatter. Back in December, Green wrote that Intervarsity had been "seduced by compartmentalized justice" when it...
Gnosticism: The American Religion
Over at The Federalist (which is rapidly becoming my favorite site for news and opinion), Peter Burfeind has written an essay that explains the philosophical roots of the sexual revolution in this country, as part of a larger rebellion against nature and reality -- an ancient rebellion known as Gnosticism:...
Washington: "Vain to exclaim against the depravity of human nature"
If you are an engineer, you understand the forces of nature so that you can exploit them in your designs. There's no point in complaining about gravity. If you wish them away or pretend they don't exist, your designs will fail. If you are organizing people, you had better understand...
C. S. Lewis remembered on 50th anniversary of his death
Overshadowed by the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination is the remembrance of the passing of another influential figure of the mid-20th century. C. S. Lewis passed away quietly at his Oxford home, a week shy of his 65th birthday, just an hour before the death of...
"He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds."
You'll be touched and encouraged by two very different stories linked by a common theme: People who are serving as God's hands to heal the brokenhearted and bind up their wounds. The Folds of Honor Foundation's cottage at Crosstimbers Marina, dedicated Memorial Day weekend, welcomes its first guests this weekend,...
Infant baptism: Is it biblical?
Those of you who tune into BatesLine for political commentary likely won't care about this, but it's my blog, so I can indulge myself with notes about a topic of discussion around our lunch table today -- the topic being the history and origins of infant baptism (aka paedobaptism, household...
Porn, video games, the Internet, anxiety, boredom, and the death of valor
When the Dean of the School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a secular philosopher hit the same theme in the same week, it's worth paying attention: First, Dean Russell Moore, writing for Desiring God Blog -- Fake Love, Fake War: Why So Many Men Are Addicted to...
Grief, observed
Two recent posts on the subject of grief, both by Oklahoma bloggers, deserve your attention. C. Michael Patton (the theologian from Edmond, not the recycler from Tulsa) lost a sister to suicide six years ago. He was encouraged to write a "grief letter" to his sister and to share it,...
Samuel Adams and the Boston Tea Party
As one of his assignments for his homeschooling program, Classical Conversations, my son Joseph wrote a biographical essay about Samuel Adams. I learned many new facts from it, and on Tax Day, on Tea Party Day, I thought it deserved a wider audience. So, without further ado, meet "the most...
Daniel Elazar, federalism, and federal theology
I was trying to find out who came up with the threefold classification of American political cultures as moralistic, individualistic, and traditionalistic. (For moralistic, think English Puritans and Norwegian Lutherans -- think Minnesota and the upper Midwest. For individualistic, think Scotch-Irish, frontiersmen, and the Southwest. For traditionalistic, think big cities...
When religious views matter in politics
The political topic of the week was Mitt Romney's speech on religion, his attempt to defuse any concerns voters may have about his Mormon faith. Over at National Review Online (of all places), Jason Lee Steorts responds to criticism that "Mormonism is nuts" (as he puts it) by saying that...
Founders Conference: David Wells to speak in Owasso
There's a great opportunity coming up later this month for Tulsa-area Christians with an interest in sound theology and a concern for the lack of interest in same which prevails in much of the evangelical realm. Dr. David Wells is professor of historical and systematic theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary....
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