Postcards from Palookaville

Yesterday, Jon Master and I headed north to New York to hear Roman Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput, deliver the 2014 Erasmus Lecture, ‘Strangers in a Strange Land.’ As a Protestant, I was interested to hear first-hand a Roman Catholic assessment of the de-...

This week's podcast is up, in which the Ref Pack talk about the greatest Reformer of them all. Further, anyone interested in catching a live videocast of a recording of the show, when we will be interviewing Dr Kent Hughes during the Preaching Conference at Westminster, will find a live stream...

Jonathan Merritt reports that evangelical ethicist David Gushee is now pro-LGBT . The move will no doubt be greeted by some as a sign of cultural capitulation and a rejection of biblical authority. Others will regard it as a hopeful sign that evangelicalism might come to regard as legitimate sexual...

Some months ago, the Ref Pack earned the ire of the Beautiful People when we raised the issue of why a well-know organisation's view of cultural engagement seemed ineradicably middle class and with more than a whiff of the preoccupations of the chatterati about it. The offending article was...

In the current struggles over identity politics and sexuality in the field of higher education (and indeed the church), we do well to hope that the Roman Catholics will hold the line. I am not particularly sympathetic to Roman Catholic theology in the main, but the institution still carries huge (...

When is a person not a person and yet still a person at the same time? Let me put the question another way. If sexual ethics is increasingly built on the sole foundation of consent between the parties, should child sexual abuse be legalized and even encouraged? If, as Ivy League ethicist Peter...

On the road this week, I've noticed some things worth reading/listening to over at Jon Master's den, A Place for Truth . First, he is launching a new podcast, Theology on the Go , the first episode of which has my seminary colleague, Scott Oliphint, discussing apologetics. Obviously, it...

One of the striking things about Bart Campolo's testimony to his loss of faith is the fact that it was the Bible’s teaching on the illegitimacy of homosexual acts which was a key element in his rejection of Christianity. I say ‘striking’ because it is strangely refreshing to...

This article in Christianity Today is remarkable for a number of reasons, perhaps especially for the eloquent line, 'In a lot of ways, I considered Driscoll one of my pastors.' Such a sentiment is certainly consistent with the risible TGC video where megachurch/multisite is discussed (...

My fellow Ref Packers have drawn my attention to the fact that Kevin DeYoung has republished his (and Ryan Kelly's) part of a friendly exchange we had recently in the British evangelical journal, Foundations . I do not want to rehearse the arguments of my original piece but I do want to...