♦ Raising Up a Child in an Age of Deconstruction
In my younger parenting days, I idolized those parents who were five or ten years ahead of me in parenting. You know the ones–their kids were polite, respectful, happy, Christian kids. I longed for my little ones to grow up like them. But now I have teenagers, and those older friends have young adults. It’s been with increasing dread that I’ve watched these further-along families crushed under a mountain of sorrow over their young-adult children who are walking into destruction.
♦ Why Even Secularists Might Not Like A Post-Christian West
The West is becoming Post-Christian. And while many secular commentators are happy with this state of affairs, there may well come a day when they, their secular children or grandchildren yearn for the time when Christianity had greater influence in the West.
Does that sound far-fetched? Not if we explore what a Post-Christian West looks like.
♦ The Benedict Option's Vision for a Christian Village
Rod Dreher's Benedict Option was fairly controversial a few years ago, but I think much of the criticism was based on a misunderstanding of what he was proposing. We don't have to agree with everything he said to find value in his approach. In this Christianity Today article, Dreher summarizes his idea.
Today, Christians who hold to the biblical teaching about sex and marriage have the same status in culture and, increasingly, in law, as racists. The culture war that began with the sexual revolution in the 1960s has now ended in defeat for Christian conservatives. The cultural left—which is to say, the American mainstream—has no intention of living in postwar peace. It is pressing forward with a harsh, relentless occupation, one that is aided by the cluelessness of Christians who don’t understand what’s happening.
I have written The Benedict Option to wake up the church, and to encourage it to act to strengthen itself, while there is still time. If we want to survive, we have to return to the roots of our faith, both in thought and in deed. We are going to have to learn habits of the heart forgotten by believers in the West. We are going to have to change our lives, and our approach to life, in radical ways. In short, we are going to have to be the church, without compromise, no matter what it costs.
♦ We Are All Apologists Now
Finally, this is a sermon by Timothy Paul Jones. You can watch the video or read his manuscript. It’s 36 minutes well spent.
Authentic Christian faith has always pressed against prevailing cultures, even when the people in those cultures have considered themselves to be Christians. The point is that, for centuries, faithfulness to a Christian way of life was widely assumed to contribute positively to the social order in Western contexts. Even when the truthfulness of Christianity was questioned and the demands of Christianity were rejected, the positive impact of Christianity was broadly assumed.
Today, however, it can no longer be assumed that Christian morality is understood to be good for the world. The public practice of Christian ethics is increasingly perceived as incompatible with human dignity and flourishing. This change has been underway for generations, but the precise stakes of this change have become more clear in recent years.
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