Volume 32 · Issue 1 · Winter 2026
Theology/2021 Fall
Confessional Identity, Cultural Engagement, Sermon

Running to the Sound of Gunfire

A 2021 conference address from Stephen Crocco on the courage Christians need to run toward the difficult places rather than away. The metaphor is military, the application is pastoral, and the audience is Reformed believers wondering whether to keep speaking at all.

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The Call to Reformation

Luther was supposed to become a lawyer; his ambitious father had a plan. A thunderstorm changed the plan. Barnes follows the personal story of how an unlikely candidate became the central figure of European Christianity in the 1500s, and what we still learn from his unexpected calling.

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Abortion and the Sacraments

Christians are made to be different. Achtemeier follows that New Testament refrain into the abortion debate, arguing that the church's witness on the unborn is finally a sacramental one: people who live by the powers of the triune Lord cannot value human life on the world's terms.

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“Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”

A century ago Harry Emerson Fosdick stood in a New York Presbyterian pulpit and preached against ordination standards he considered illiberal. Burnett returns to that famous sermon for its centennial, asking what it set in motion, what it cost, and what it still tells us about American Christianity.

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Clothes Make the Man (or the Woman)?

What clergy wear in worship has changed in his lifetime, and Taylor isn't quite sure all the changes are improvements. Working from Lorimer's nineteenth-century painting of a Scottish Kirk ordination, he reflects on the theology of vestments and what gets lost when the gown disappears.

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What is Marriage?

Two competing answers to what marriage is: a conjugal union ordered toward the bearing and rearing of children, or a romantic partnership defined by emotional commitment. George argues that the disagreement isn't really about same-sex marriage at all but about whether marriage has any inherent structure to defend.

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