Book Review: Strong and Courageous
By Rhett Burns Strong and Courageous: Following Jesus Amid the Rise of America’s New Religion by Tom Ascol and Jared Longshore (Founders Press, January 15, 2021) The United States of America is witnessing the ascent of a new religion, characterized by the twin goddesses of individual autonomy and universal equality, and fueled by the spirit […]
Fire in the Chest: The Imminent Sexual Reckoning
By Rhett Burns Your house is on fire, but you don’t realize it yet. It’s an electrical fire, tearing through the walls, ready to engulf everything you have. You’re scrolling through Netflix, unaware of the havoc to come in fifteen minutes. This is the situation of evangelical churches in America. Decades of downgrade in the […]
The America to Come
By Rhett Burns Is it accurate to say that American society has been careening toward a cliff for some time now, and the events of 2020—coronavirus, presidential election, and the social justice riots—have sped it along to the edge? That’s the question I posed to a historian, a futurist, and a pastor at the recent […]
Ok Dude: Zuby’s Truth-Telling New Single
Rap succeeds best as a transgressive genre—hard men saying hard truths against the spirit of the age. Zuby’s new single Ok Dude hits the mark in just this way. But first, the backstory: In February, Twitter suspended Zuby’s account (@ZubyMusic) after he replied “Ok dude” to a male transgender activist who identifies as a woman. […]
Cake Bakers, Crossfit, and The French Revolution
I was recently sitting in on a lecture from a local university professor on the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Whitworth University’s Dr. Van Inwegen explained that there are stories from history, “that help us understand the world we are in.” One of his stories did just that. During the French Revolution, after […]
Investigating Us – An Interview with Musician Joel Ansett
Joel, thanks for joining us at The Westminster Confession of Funk, hosted by CrossPolitic. So you have a new Kickstarter out. Your last one was a big success. What have you learned about yourself as a musician since your last kickstarter, “The Nature of Us”? Great question. Goodness what have I learned. As a musician, […]
Milton’s Political Uselessness
In 1652 John Milton went completely blind. His eyes had been waning, the world fading, for some time. The darkening was complete the same year his first wife and only son died at one year old. He was a published poet, but he had spent his energy in English politics and education since the time […]
Idol Matching 3
Recap In this series, we’ve been dealing with some of the idols in the world that need to be torn down and the fact that Christians keep their own version of these idols in their hearts. Same-sex mirage out there is akin in some ways to fornication and sexual looseness or an unbiblical desire for […]
Idol Matching 2
Round Two Same-sex mirage and divorce. Same-sex mirage and fornication. In a previous post, I argued that far too often, the idolatry we enshrine in our own hearts matches the idolatry present in same-sex mirage. As Christians, when we countenance any sort of abuse of God’s gifts of sexual intimacy and marriage, namely divorce and […]
To Persuade or Alienate … that is the Question
As Christians, we are to be salty. Christians are to be winsome, but we’ve become increasingly unsavory. Let’s face it, most Christians are not known by what they are for, but by what they are against. Relentless criticism is never a good platform to persuade anyone. Long ago, Aristotle defined rhetoric as the art of […]