Podcast pick of the week: If you’ve not yet listened to Mark Sayers’ and John Mark Comer’s This Cultural Moment, now is the time to catch up. Start at the beginning. Terrific cultural analysis of events and movements across the globe, how they’re affecting the church, and the revival we should long for.
Kindle Deal: Holiness Day by Day: Transformational Thoughts for Your Spiritual Journey by Jerry Bridges. $3.99.
Seven of the best articles I came across this week:
1. Seth Kaplan – What is Community? “An actual community is much harder to create and, especially in the modern West, still harder to sustain. It requires commitment to a certain social order—and, crucially, a place—that by definition must constrain individual choice.”
2. Alisa Childers – Let’s Deconstruct a Deconversion Story: The Case of Rhett and Link. Maybe the whole deconversion narrative is due for a bit of deconstruction.
3. Zeynep Tufekci – Preparing the Coronavirus to Strike the U.S. We should prepare, not because we may feel personally at risk, but so that we can help lessen the risk for everyone. Also, Marvin Olasky – Love Without Foolhardiness. Olasky applies Martin Luther’s teaching on a plague in his time to coronavirus concerns today.
4. John M. Barry – How the Horrific 1918 Flu Spread Across America. The toll of history’s worst epidemic surpasses all the military deaths in World War I and World War II combined. And even though we call it the Spanish flu, it may have begun in the United States.
5. Michael Youssef – Does Christianity Need Saving? If we change the substance of Christianity in order to make “converts,” is it still Christianity? If our “Christianity” no longer proclaims salvation by faith in Christ, what are we converting people to?
6. R. Lucas Stamps and Brandon D. Smith – Was Jesus Omniscient? Stamps and Smith address a tricky theological question.
7. Ruth Graham – The Bible That Oozed Oil. This is excellent reporting (and storytelling) on a glimpse of charismatic Christianity, politics, money, and the South. All in one story.
