The Issue of our Day
This week I read a news article that broke my heart and called me to repentance. In the midst of the fight over the budget and debt ceiling, in the midst of the ongoing saga of the “Bling-Bling Bishop”...
View ArticleThe Passions of Perpetua and Frans van der Lugt
Jesus warned that those who wanted to be his disciples would have to take up their crosses and follow him, at the risk of losing their lives. During Holy Week, Christians rightfully focus their...
View ArticleA Time to Mourn
There are so many things that compete for our attention. Gaza, Ukraine, and Ebola, deservedly so. Celebrity cheating rumors, royal baby rumors, not as important as wars and rumors of wars. Perhaps as...
View ArticleThe Reality of Persecution
Rome was not the only empire in antiquity, nor the only one with a sizable Christian population. I stress that repeatedly because of the number of times we read about Christian engagement with the...
View ArticleShapur’s Great Persecution
I posted on the topic of early Christian martyrdom, arguing that the phenomenon was as widespread as Christian writers claimed, and that it truly was driven by religious motives. That was especially...
View ArticleThe Passion of Martin Scorsese
After literally decades of planning and delay, Martin Scorsese has finally released his film of Shusaku Endo’s classic novel Silence, about the persecution of Catholic Christians in seventeenth century...
View ArticleThe Heresies That Men Do Leave
People often change their religious identity, shifting from one faith or denomination to another. They vary a lot in how they regard the religion they leave. Sometimes, converts have a benevolent view...
View ArticleVoices of the Voiceless
I need to declare an interest in what follows. I am writing here about a new book called Voices of the Voiceless: Religion, Communism and the Keston Archive, edited by Julie deGraffenried and Zoe Knox,...
View ArticleThe Ilston Church and the Baptist Defection
When modern people read about Christian history, most find it very hard indeed to understand why bygone eras cared so much about religious issues – about things that we might dismiss as “just...
View Article
