But Christians must be willing to ask themselves some hard questions. Is irrational fear driving our cultural and political engagement more than it should? By angry public statements in support of the candidates they prefer, are Christians demonstrating a gospel-shaped view of the world and of the future? When Christian theology is communicated in the language of fear it distorts the very words of the Bible. Love for our neighbors must overcome the temptation to abandon a Christian ethic in pursuit of political victory.
The Problems with Post-Modern Interpretation of the Bible
And we need to listen to their texts prayerfully and carefully and do the original human authors justice (not to mention the divine Author), doing them the good service of allowing them to have a say, even today. A Biblical text without its original historical, rhetorical, social, literary, archaeological texts becomes a pretext for whatever you want it to mean, and this is not a good thing, it’s a bad thing. Nor is the meaning of a text merely ‘a matter of my opinion’ vs. yours. Why not? Because there is an actual meaning in those Biblical texts which can only be discerned with a combination of careful exegesis attending to the various original contexts and prayerful reflection with the guidance of God’s Spirit.
At the 3:30 mark of the video he says “HOW MUCH DO YOU HAVE TO HATE SOMEONE TO BELIEVE THAT EVERLASTING LIFE IS POSSIBLE AND NOT TELL THEM THAT?”
He also says that he has no respect for someone who believes something and does not care enough about others to share that message.
This video floored me because even someone who asserts that there is no God understands the importance of evangelism in the life of a Christian!
Eight Characteristics of the New Bivocational Pastor
I see the marketplace pastor trend as a very healthy movement in American congregations. We will soon see many attorneys, physicians, and key businesspersons who will continue in their marketplace jobs while serving a church as well.
Kenyan Muslim who shielded Christians in al-Shabab attack dies
A Muslim teacher who shielded Christian fellow passengers when their bus was attacked by Islamist militants has died in surgery to treat his bullet wound.
Salah Farah was on a bus travelling through Mandera in Kenya when it was attacked by al-Shabab in December.
The attackers told the Muslims and Christians to split up but he was among Muslim passengers who refused.
Snark attack: Cornell students teach software to detect sarcasm!
The students turned to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk paid crowdsourcing service to obtain 158 more sarcastic reviews and collected 99 sarcastic reviews and 257 non-sarcastic reviews on their own, achieving a total training set of 1,188. On a test sample of 100 sarcastic and 100 non-sarcastic Amazon reviews, the TrueRatr system—based on a “random forest” decision tree algorithm rather than the model originally used by Hong—scored slightly better than Hong’s original, achieving a 75 percent precision score.