This note responds to a reply to an earlier—and too brief, and in its brevity perhaps a bit careless—comment of mine decrying our president’s response to a question about rising threats of anti-Semitic violence. So here I want to say something a little more carefully. I am grateful to anyone who reads my posts, andContinue reading “On the impossibility of failing to condemn anti-Semitism”
Author Archives: James Ernest
Rebuke-slogans that I will not use, and what I think we must say instead
I have been seeing a lot of a couple of three-word slogans: “Not my president!” and “Get over it!” I think I understand both, but I reject both, and a third to which I think they reduce, and choose to affirm a fourth. 1. The first is Not my president! I cannot say “My president!”Continue reading “Rebuke-slogans that I will not use, and what I think we must say instead”
Politics in church?
A Christian who does not want to hear about politics in church . . . is quite possibly a Christian who wishes to exclude the all-creating love of God, the self-emptying lordship of Christ, and the convicting, illuminating, purifying, and empowering activity of the Spirit from a decisively important aspect of his or her and our life and thought.
Politics and hope: Thoughts from Charles Mathewes
What now? Denial? Despair? Attack? Retreat? Exhaustion? How about some teaching and learning for the long haul? Christians cannot afford to be tired of politics, or worse yet, to be apolitical—as if that were even possible. We have to be more deeply and wisely and Christianly political. Although Christianity (unlike Judaism and Islam) does notContinue reading “Politics and hope: Thoughts from Charles Mathewes”
Tu quoque, yer mom!, and the way forward
Current events have me remembering some long-forgotten terms from informal logic. The general category is popular fallacies. One in particular that we saw almost every time a criticism was voiced against someone was the tu quoque fallacy. You can read about it in Wikipedia. Tu quoque is Latin for “you also.” What we saw inContinue reading “Tu quoque, yer mom!, and the way forward”
Hard questions, correct answers, and pastoral wisdom
This is mostly for my evangelical friends, about pastors. It takes off from a recent NY Times op-ed piece but goes beyond it to say something about pastoral leadership and how we respond to it. Perhaps some of you saw and appreciated Tim Keller’s answers to questions from Nicholas Kristof . I saw them andContinue reading “Hard questions, correct answers, and pastoral wisdom”
My strangely unedifying Facebook posts
This post is directed to friends who have found my “political” Facebook posts this year strange or off-putting. Yes: they are strange. For me, this is an opus alienum, a strange work, a thing I am doing that is not the thing I have been primarily called and trained to do, not a thing I likeContinue reading “My strangely unedifying Facebook posts”
God bless America?
Last Thursday evening my wife and I went with a group of my work colleagues to a West Michigan Whitecaps game. A good time was had by all, as they say. The fact that this was minor-league play at its furthest remove from the majors didn’t bother me; in any sport, I’d rather watch theContinue reading “God bless America?”
A response to Swaim’s “Stott Bowdlerized” (Eerdword)
In the Internet era, incomplete research and careless retweeting can lead to false accusations and damaging digital gossip. * * * Through the course of my publishing career I have not usually bothered authors for autographs, but as a high-school senior attending the 1976 Urbana convention with my central Virginia youth group, I was eagerContinue reading “A response to Swaim’s “Stott Bowdlerized” (Eerdword)”
A leaf from the journal of a theological publisher
I guess in any line of work one invited to lead will now and then gather the team and ask: what do we imagine we are doing? If you take someone who might really rather be reading the ancients reading the Bible and put him in that position in your publishing company, you might getContinue reading “A leaf from the journal of a theological publisher”
