Stanley Kubrick made the movie Dr. Strangelove as a joke in 1964. His dark comedy took aim at the fragile egos of politicians in the U.S. and U.S.S.R. that threatened to push our world over the precipice of a nuclear…
Editor’s Note: This post is adapted from Laughing at the Days to Come: Facing Present Trials and Future Uncertainties with Gospel Hope (RHB, 2019). My once bright future suddenly seemed dark. The onset of a rare neurological disease was causing…
Much that passes for Christian decision making in modern Evangelicalism strikes me as a mixture of lazy moral reasoning and illegitimate efforts to discern those “secret things” (Deut. 29:29) that God has never promised to reveal to us. Scripture has…
David and Goliath. Field of Dreams. Star Wars. Rocky. The Sandlot. The Hunger Games. Underdog stories never get old. We can’t help loving them. They also contain a distinctively American flavor, probably because this country only exists because the underdog…
As 2018 winds to a close, we want to express our deep and sincere gratitude to the many faithful readers of Ref21. We continue our commitment to call the church to a reformation that recovers clarity and conviction about the great…
When–in the Institutes of the Christian Religion (1.15.1)–John Calvin turned his attention to the creation of mankind, he did so with a view to further elaborate his assertion that we cannot have a clear and complete knowledge God unless we have a…
May 10, 2018 was the most beautiful yet painful day of our lives. Our long-awaited daughter, Dayna Euphemia, safely entered into the world and became part of our family. This is our family’s story about the pain, hope, sorrow and…
Several days ago I was distracted from my mid-afternoon, back-porched task of grading college research papers by the presence of a pair of cardinals flitting around our yard. As I watched them doing what cardinals do, I began wondering whence…
Like many eighteenth-century Reformed pastors, Jonathan Edwards was confident in his ability to discern God’s purposes in earthly events. For example, during a 1736 drought, he explained that God was chastising New Englanders for the “corruption in our hearts.” Similarly,…
Calvin apparently lived with a profound awareness of the potential for death that constantly accompanies us as human beings. In 1.17.10 of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, the Reformer provided a rather sobering catalog of the “innumerable … deaths…
