Recently in Faith Category
A Christian philosopher's path to truth | WORLD
Douglas Groothuis writes: "Of the myriad books that have shaped my worldview, these four live in me. I have read them repeatedly and have taught them to university students over many years." The God Who Is There, by Francis Schaeffer; Pensées, by Blaise Pascal; The Abolition of Man, by C. S. Lewis; Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman.
From the US Naval Academy Navigators resources page, a list of the verses and categories in the Nav's Topical Memory System. There are 2 verses each for 6 topics in 5 sets, for a total of 60 verses. I memorized this set back in college, using the New American Standard Bible.
This page offers MP3s of the Topical Memory System verses being read in various English translations, along with a written commentary on each verse by LeRoy Eims. At the bottom of the page are MP3s of the entire 60-verse set for KJV, RSV, NIV, and NASB. One version has the reader recite each verse once; the other has a repetition of each verse.
Mainline Protestantism's Fall? - Juicy Ecumenism
Mark Tooley writes: "The membership of Mainline Protestant denominations has declined by millions, and thousands of churches have closed. Many more thousands of churches, some barely surviving with a dwindling number of elderly members, will close soon. But thousands of Mainline congregations endure. Some are vital. A few are growing. And nearly universally they have very few members who care about their denominations. These members simply like their congregations....
"Some Mainline clergy are stuck in old habits and still pretend we are in 1985. Their churches will fade along with the denominations. But others are wiser. I recently lunched with a young Episcopal cleric whose church is near ours. The parking lot is full on Sundays. He told me when he came there during the pandemic while the church was physically closed the old congregation melted away. The nearly 200 people there now are young and overwhelmingly indifferent to the Episcopal Church. Some are Southern Baptists. Many have children. They like having a local church with ministries for their families. He is meeting their needs. This Episcopal priest is not conservative, but he declined a liberal parishioner's demands that he be politically outspoken from the pulpit. He knows that will not work. And it does not interest him."
Plutarch, De defectu oraculorum, section 17
The Greek historian Plutarch recounts a visit to Delphi and a dialogue about the disappearance of prophecy from once famous oracles. This section is an anecdote about a ship sailing in the Ionian Sea. A voice on the island of Paxi calls the ship's pilot by name and commands, "When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead." The pilot, Thamus, was summoned by the Emperor Tiberius, who commissioned an inquiry. Via Charles Haywood on X. Josh Centers replied to Haywood, "It was widely reported in the ancient world that the old pagan rituals stopped working after the resurrection. Christ overthrew the pagan gods and trampled down death by death." The death and resurrection of Christ occurred during the reign of Tiberius (AD 14 - AD 37).
John Milton's poem, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," concludes with a description of the downfall of Satan and the old pagan gods at the birth of Jesus:
And then at last our bliss
Full and perfect is,
But now begins; for from this happy day
Th'old Dragon under ground,
In straiter limits bound,
Not half so far casts his usurped sway,
And, wrath to see his kingdom fail,
Swinges the scaly horror of his folded tail.The Oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-ey'd priest from the prophetic cell.
Manuscripts - Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts
A searchable comprehensive database of New Testament manuscripts, with details of each and links to images.
The Bible and the American Founders, by Daniel Dreisbach
Prof. Dreisbach's 2017 talk on the influence of the Bible on government in America's founding era bolsters the case for Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters's push to include the Bible in public education. American history can't be comprehended apart from the Bible.
"How did the Bible inform the founders' political and legal pursuits? I want to get a little bit more specific here. As I've already said, the founders held diverse views, including diverse theological views. Some doubted Christianity's transcendent claims. Some doubted the Bible's divine origins. But I'm going to suggest to you that many in this generation looked to the Scriptures for insights into things like human nature, civic virtue, social order, political authority, and other concepts essential to the establishment of a political society. Perhaps more important, there was broad agreement that the Bible was essential for nurturing the kind of civic virtues that give citizens the capacity for self-government. In various conventions and representative assemblies of the age as well as in pamphlets, political sermons, and private papers, founding figures appealed to the Bible for principles, precedents, models, normative standards, and cultural motifs, to define their community and to order their great political experiments. The Bible, some thought, offered guidance on how to select righteous leaders. They thought the Bible offered guidance on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, including the right to resist a tyrannical government....
"I don't think you can understand the most basic, fundamental features of the American constitutional design -- and by that I have in mind things like limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, rule of law, due process of law and representative government -- without understanding this biblical anthropology, this idea that man is a fallen creature, and where power is given, that power must be checked."
Monday Morning Prayer: Dr. Stan Zygmunt - YouTube
A friend from Campus Crusade at MIT, now a long-time physics professor at Valparaiso University, speaks at a college chapel service on why we don't ask for help and why we should anyway.
This end-times movie was a staple of 1970s Baptist youth group New Year's Eve parties. First of a trilogy continued by A Distant Thunder and Image of the Beast. There's no time to change your mind. The Son has come, and you've been left behind.
Back in the early 2000s, Jeff Friend and Chris Huber wrote a comic strip called "Which Circle?" a thinly-veiled spoof of Campus Crusade for Christ as they encountered it in their college years. Sixteen episodes, which were published in The [Wittenburg] Door, are available on Facebook. The archived whichcircle.com website appears to have a complete collection of 21 episodes and features commentaries from Friend and Huber, elaborating on the aspects of Cru culture that inspired each episode. Jon Bitterhouse, the Wildwood summer project director in Episode 10, is based on a real staffer who was my summer project city director in Quezon City, the Phillipines, in 1983. I found a lot in the strip that echoed my experiences, particularly the condescending attitudes displayed toward rival campus ministries.
Church leaders: If you think you're neutral, you're drifting left | Clear Truth Media
Joel Berry writes: "The particulars of the political parties aren't just a set of neutral tools, they are a series of conclusions that follow logically from very different starting points. The politics of the right grow from the worldview of the Right. The politics of the Left grow from the worldview of the Left. There are sinners on both sides, there are imperfect solutions on both sides. But they are far from neutral.
"And right now, the culture, all our institutions, our politics, and our pop-culture, are all moving Left. Christians aren't leading the way in this drift. At this point, they're just along for the ride. At the highest levels of Leftism both culturally and politically, you see people who are unapologetic about their hostility towards God and everything good, true, and beautiful. The Leftist movement starts with the assumption of a godless universe populated by an animal species that through evolution can build heaven here on earth. All their politics follow from that beginning. Every power center on earth, almost without exception, is following their lead."
