C.S. Lewis on the difference between forgiveness and excusing – from his essay, “On Forgiveness.”
“I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different. I am asking him not to forgive
With the goal of taking “a step toward clarifying what the ancient enterprise of relating faith and learning might mean in the academy today,” George Marsden’s landmark work, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (1997, Oxford University Press) is worth rereading every so often to remind us (or acquaint us for the first time) of what it could mean for Christians to engage the world of academia
I’m sure you’ve noticed the crop of new books aimed at addressing another crop of new books. Christians have produced an enormous arsenal of literature to counter the claims of the new atheists that say God is not good, a delusion, or the cause of everything bad in the world. Just one example, and an excellent one at that, is Greg Ganssle’s A Reasonable God: Engaging the New Face of Atheism.
This won’t be a thorough treatise about such a complicated topic. It can’t be. But I have wrestled with the balance between evangelism and social justice for a while and I’d like to offer a way to think about the relationship because this is becoming a frequent topic of discussion.
First, I choose the term “Mercy
Certain articles take on the status of cultural landmarks. Several years ago, an Atlantic Monthly cover article entitled, Dan Quayle was Right, achieved that ranking. People on both sides of the debate about the family pointed to that article for ammunition for or against various points.
Another article has just appeared which may