17 articles from 13 issues, 1998 to 2025
Burgess opens with a year he spent at an East Berlin seminary in the 1980s, when Marxism-Leninism claimed total interpretive authority. Forty years later, he hears the Barmen Declaration's refusal of competing 'lords' speaking again to a church tempted by every ideology offering easier answers than Christ.
Ninety years ago a small group of pastors and elders in Barmen refused the Nazis' attempt to colonize the gospel. Working revisits Karl Barth's text and finds a confession that still names the temptation: any blood-and-soil ideology that asks the church to add another word to the one Word of God.
Crocco listens to a psychiatrist friend who can't say what she actually thinks about gender dysphoria treatment without losing her license. The conversation pulls Solzhenitsyn's plea to 'live not by lies' from the Soviet bloc into our own moment, and asks what costs Christians should expect.
Edwards encountered Ernst Lohmeyer's name as a footnote in his doctoral research and was haunted by the cryptic note that a 'higher power' had carried him off to a 'still-unresolved fate.' The piece traces Lohmeyer's witness under three regimes and what his disappearance can teach us.
The Bible doesn't supply a roadmap for Mideast policy, but it does offer a framework. Wisdom draws principles from the biblical story: God owns the land, the powerful tend to dominate the powerless, the people of God must act justly toward outsiders, and no political order can be trusted absolutely.
Middle Eastern Christian minorities have a painful political history, and they've sometimes made the mess worse. Wisdom traces how Arab Christians moved between democratic statesmen like Charles Malik and the nationalist movements that ultimately failed to protect them, and what the record teaches about Christian political alliances.
Evangelical support for Israel is often dismissed as purely theological, a matter of obscure end-times prophecies. Wisdom argues there's plenty of evidence that doesn't require special revelation: a small minority people surviving repeated attempts at extermination is unique enough to read on the surface.
Christians who hold a high view of biblical inspiration are sometimes most tempted to wring policy prescriptions out of texts that weren't written for that purpose. Wisdom warns against the apocalyptic-prophecy approach to Mideast policy, and recovers a more sober use of Scripture for political discernment.
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.
A Q&A summary from Stanton and Maier's book Marriage on Trial: The Case Against Same-Sex Marriage and Parenting. The piece walks through why no society has allowed a 'suit yourself' approach to family, and what natural marriage between a man and woman accomplishes that nothing else does.
Can the church hold to its teaching on marriage while society goes another way? Alan Wisdom reviews the forces that weakened marriage and the evidence for its benefits, then weighs three policy options for American Christians.
What does the evidence say marriage does for children, spouses and a free society? Scholars gathered by the Witherspoon Institute set out ten principles, review the social science, and propose five areas for public action.
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