Visit Elgin Park
Welcome to Michael Paul Smith’s Elgin Park! For over 25 years, Michael has been building delightfully detailed scale models. Elgin Park is a collection of 1/24 scale recreations of everyday scenes from mid-20th century America.
Why Blood Shocks
The bloodiness of our age is not an anomaly. Ultra-modern blood tests and pre-modern vampire myths get at something the Christian Scriptures already tell us about reality: The life is in the blood. Immediately after walking off the Ark into a new creation, the patriarch Noah is commanded not to eat the blood of animals, blood that is said to be “the life of the flesh.”
Christ’s Death and Our Justification (Romans 4.25)
Prepositions can be nasty things. Part of the problem is that the meaning of some can be quite fluid, hard to nail down. But the advantage of prepositions is exactly the same; they are fluid and can often mean many different things.
Christian Faith: Calvinism is Back
Today, his (Calvin’s) theology is making a surprising comeback, challenging the me-centered prosperity gospel of much of modern evangelicalism with a God-first immersion in Scripture. In an age of materialism and made-to-order religion, Calvinism’s unmalleable doctrines and view of God as an all-powerful potentate who decides everything is winning over many Christians – especially the young. Twenty-something followers in the Presbyterian, Anglican, and independent evangelical churches are rallying around Calvinist, or Reformed, teaching.
Homeless in Binghamton
For some 130 years, the city was the home to the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd. But recently, the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York sold the pretty little church building on Conklin Avenue to the Islamic Awareness Center.
John Piper’s Upcoming Leave
I asked the elders to consider this leave because of a growing sense that my soul, my marriage, my family, and my ministry-pattern need a reality check from the Holy Spirit. On the one hand, I love my Lord, my wife, my five children and their families first and foremost; and I love my work of preaching and writing and leading Bethlehem. I hope the Lord gives me at least five more years as the pastor for preaching and vision at Bethlehem.
A Befuddled Bishop in a Bewildering Time
Long before Canterbury or Cluny there was Carthage. It was in North Africa that the fledgling Christian faith earned many of its spurs and fumbled its way through some of its most tortuous theological debates. North Africa produced men like Cyprian and Tertullian, it suffered some of the worst blasts of imperial persecution, and, during the fourth and fifth centuries, it witnessed the rise and fall of one of the most significant movements in early Christian history: Donatism. Topping the bill there is Augustine. He was embroiled in many Christendom-spanning controversies but nothing agitated him quite so much as the ferocious squabble in his own backyard.
The Baldhawk
Such is the road I walk. I’ve accepted that funny position in Christianity. I write about the issues most theologians won’t touch. You think Rick Warren is warning you about Deep V-Neck Syndrome? You think Rob Bell is going to bust out some ancient Jewish theory on the tankini, perhaps “dust of the tankini?” Hardly. That’s why when I witnessed something a few weeks ago at church, I had to give you a heads up. I am of course talking about . . . . the baldhawk.
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