George Grant
By George Grant The race really does go to the tortoise and not the hare. It is perseverance that ultimately will win the prize, not knowledge, not talent, and not connections. It is that undying tenacity that sets itself on the end, that finishes the race, that completes the task, and that fulfils the responsibility. […]
Note from Managing Editor: Given the sensitive nature of this material, the author of this piece asked to remain anonymous. The author hopes this story will be helpful to many people. This past year my 15-year-old niece decided she was a boy. For the last two years, kids at school have bullied her, thrown rocks […]
By Gabriel Rench Justice Needs the Bible There has been a lot of chatter back and forth the last couple years around social justice and the church: definitions are vague, people are talking past each other, and both sides have not really pursued productive conversations. One thing is for sure, the discussion has largely focused […]
Cartoon by Justin Hatcher
Guest Post by Joost Nixon Last year on a rainy day near Kathmandu, a Nepali friend and I were on an evening errand for milk. We were tight-rope walking on top of walls because the rain had transformed the dirt roads into goo. Our route took us near a rare unplowed field and an adjacent […]
Guest Post by Jared Longshore Secularism is all in a tizzy. She is hot and pouty. She’s fired up and making her demands. She’s defying the armies of the living God, and she’s soft as cotton… which is not a good combo. God’s people have struggled at times with going forward at God’s command. He […]
Guest Post By C.R. Wiley A lot of ink has been spilled on the subject of fragility, particularly when it comes to young people—you know, safe-spaces, and coloring books on college campuses, and all of that. And while I could add my voice to the chorus, I think fragility is more pervasive than this. I […]
By Jesse Sumpter You can’t make this stuff up. A 69 year old Dutch man, named Emile Ratelband, has decided he wants to identify as a 40 year old. He has even asked a court in his hometown to make it legal and change his birth certificate to say he was born on March 11, […]
In his Confessions, Augustine (354-430) describes mankind’s universal sinful bent as “concupiscence.” The Greek word epithumia (ἐπιθυμία) occurs 38 times in the New Testament. It describes the utter enfeebling of mankind’s freedom of will through the bondage of sin. It is the fallen nature’s inclination to wickedness, desire for immorality, and passion for iniquity, that […]
Poet, literary critic, and novelist, Arthur Quiller-Couch, was best known for his incomparable anthology, The Oxford Book of English Verse. As a lecturer at Oxford beginning in 1886 and a professor at Cambridge from 1912-1944, he taught an entire generation of English writers how to write. Exceedingly prolific himself, he wrote in almost every conceivable […]
Haarlem is a beautiful little Dutch town on the River Spaarne, fifteen minutes by train from Amsterdam. Founded sometime in the 10th century, in 1245 it was granted city status or stadsrechten and was made the capital of the province of North Holland. By the 14th century, it had become a mercantile hub as a […]
When I was in seminary, the “Church Growth Movement” was just getting its sea legs. So, of course, it was all the rage in the hallowed halls of academia—if not amongst the profs, most assuredly amongst their charges. Filled with uninformed enthusiasm my peers tended to gobble up every fad and fancy that came down […]
The years leading up to the Scottish Disruption and those immediately afterward produced some of the most remarkable servants of God in the history of the church. Andrew Alexander Bonar (1810-1892) was a member of that galaxy of brilliant, Reformed Scots preachers, writers, and missionaries which included his brothers John, James, and Horatius, as well […]
The horrific ruthlessness of ISIS, the brazen cruelty of Boko Haram, the obsessive repression of the North Korean Juche, the vicious terrorism of Al-Qaeda: I confess that when faced with the gleeful persecution of my Christian brothers and sisters around the world in recent days, I am shocked. But, I know I shouldn’t be. Long […]
Every year new words and phrases find their way into our vocabulary. Sometimes these neologisms are the result of political turns of events, like Brexit, alt-right, or newsjacking. Sometimes it is technology and digital media that introduce new words like hashtag, emoji, or listicle. Other times, it is trends in pop culture that manufactures new […]
In his classic book, The Holiness of God, R.C. Sproul bemoans the absence from our vocabulary of certain, once-familiar, King James Version words. It wasn’t so much the loss of antiquated verb forms like walketh and talketh, or sayest and mayest that bothered him. It wasn’t obsolete pronouns like thou and thee, or thy and […]
“And thus was he called Ichabod, for the glory of the Lord had departed.” 1 Samuel 4:21 The rising tide of heresy in the latter half of the fourth century very nearly engulfed the entire church. Most of the Nicean fathers had either passed into glory or were constrained by dotage. Even the seemingly ageless […]
“Jeremiad.” Definition: an elaborate and prolonged lamentation; a cry of woe; and expression of righteous indignation. “Nehemiad.” Definition: an elaborate and prolonged humiliation; a cry of grief; an expression of righteous repentance. Well might we plead the case for an outpouring of Jeremiads from Reformed and Evangelical pulpits in our day. What with inhuman humanism […]
All leaders are controversial. They invariably risk the ire of others. Because they stand for certain things, they necessarily stand against certain things. This causes them to stand out. It makes them more than a little peculiar in this plain vanilla world of smothering uniformity. G.K. Chesterton asserted, “A man with a definite belief always […]
It is one of the great ironies of our day that Christians can pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven,” and not actually mean anything by it. Indeed, it is a stunning paradox that we can live as if such a prayer could not be answered. Even worse, we can […]