Tag: faith

Religion & the Presidents

  

My upper-level history adjunct offering this semester at Southeastern University is a course I’ve taught only once before but am eager to do so again. It’s the final one I developed when I was full-time at the university: Religion and the Presidents. The aim is to examine and analyze each president’s religious beliefs (or sometimes the lack thereof) and personal character to see how those beliefs showed up in their personal lives and in their public policies when they became… Read more »

On Putting Carts Before Horses

  

A phrase I’ve heard throughout my life, “putting the cart before the horse,” comes to mind for me when I survey the Christian response to politics in our day. Or at least the response that many Christians are making with respect to the current political scene. The phrase means “reversing the proper order of things,” and I see that more and more. Christians should always put the Gospel and the Kingdom of God before anything else, and we can sometimes… Read more »

Reversing the Faith of an Adult Lifetime

  

Over the years, I’ve taught my “Witness of Whittaker Chambers” course many times. It never gets old or stale; in fact, each time I sense that the Lord uses it to help me see even more of His mercy and grace. The life of Whittaker Chambers exemplifies God’s grace while simultaneously challenging readers of his masterful autobiography, Witness, to seek ever more earnestly the face of God. In teaching the course this semester, the depth of Chambers’s personal path and… Read more »

Observing a Grief

  

This past week in my “C. S. Lewis on Life, Death, and Eternity” class at church, I and the other 35 participants who joined me either in person or via Zoom, immersed ourselves in Lewis’s painfully personal account of how he reacted to the death of his wife, Joy. What began as some jottings—almost stream-of-consciousness writing—in a notebook eventually did find its way into print as A Grief Observed. Some find this little book disconcerting because it reveals the struggle… Read more »

To My Fellow Christian Believers during COVID-19

  

How should Christians act, react, and think, while going through the current COVID-19 “social distancing” restrictions? There are some divisions being revealed and “sides” being taken among some, not all, of my fellow believers. For what it’s worth, I’d like to offer my thoughts on this. I hope you will give them a hearing, if not complete acceptance. Unity is always difficult in the best of times, let alone when our feelings may be intensified during a stretch when we… Read more »

The Faith & Faithfulness of Catherine Marshall

  

I remember, as a teenager, watching the movie A Man Called Peter, and being profoundly impacted by the faith displayed in the film, not only of Peter Marshall himself, but also of his wife, Catherine. You know how some things always stay with you? That movie did, and I’m grateful to God that He placed such influences in my life early on. The Christian History e-mail offering from yesterday focused on Catherine Marshall and how God fulfilled her desire to… Read more »

Depth in The Silver Chair

  

I wrote in a earlier post that I’m preparing to teach C. S. Lewis’s entire Narnia series (in the published order) on Wednesday evenings at my church—the first three in the fall quarter and the last four in the winter (although here in Florida the word “winter” is more like “far less humid and much more comfortable”). My goal is to finish this preparation during the summer, as I will be quite busy when the new semester begins at my… Read more »