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Almost 20 years ago, the journal First Things published an article by a famous German theologian named Wolfhart Pannenberg titled “How to Think About Secularism.” In the article, Pannenberg outlined the nature of secularism and how it threatened the church, also explaining how the church should not respond to the challenge. Looking back, it’s clear that many of our pastors and leaders have done the opposite of what he counseled, and we are paying the price for it today. Pannenberg himself was orthodox in some of his beliefs and unorthodox in others, but I’m focusing here on his observations about...

Geneva, March 3, Interfax - Aggressive secularism is picking up pace in the West, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. "I can't leave out problems which Christians have been experiencing in many counties, where it is deemed politically incorrect to speak about one's Christian identity and where Christian values, the nucleus of European civilization, are being shunned," he said at a high-level conference on the defense of Christians in Geneva. "Aggressive secularism is picking up pace, and the notions of moral decency and traditional ethnic, cultural and religious identity are being eroded," the Russian foreign minister said. "Vandalism and the...

A couple of years ago, a former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, warned Christians that the faith is in danger. Here is the article: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Christianity-Anglican-Extinct-Carey/2013/11/25/id/538425/ According to the article, only 800,000 people are church-goers in Britain. Britain had a total population of 64 million in 2013. This means that only 1.25 percent of the British population are church-going Christians. The future of America seems to be going in Britain's direction. I wanted to add an update to Lord Carey's observations. A lot of people think the Third World is the future of Christianity. But Brazil, the largest Latin American country,...

It's a common, but misconceived, idea that Western people have grown disillusioned with religion because of religious wars in the distant or - in the almost unique case of Northern Ireland - recent past. People on the Left have taken this view with a bit more consistency than those on the Right. Think of John Lennon's song Imagine. He saw world peace and unification in the abolition of what he considered as all causes of division and conflict: religion, class, nation. Lennon was, to put it in euphemistically-correct language, "cognitively challenged", but at least one can't deny his consistency...

For believing Christians, the identity of Jesus was announced at the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451): Jesus was always divine and human simultaneously. How did this work? Very simply, “it’s a mystery.” But a fuller explanation of how a peasant became God is the subject of Bart Ehrman’s latest book, “How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee,” and the subject of contentious debate among scholars. Several colleagues published a response titled “How God Became Jesus.” Mr. Ehrman, a professor at the University of North Carolina, is a popular speaker on the evolution of Christian theology...

In the past, this season was marked by a greater interest in divinity, the family hearth and the joy of children. Increasingly our society has been turning away from such simple human pleasures, replacing them with those of technology. Despite the annual holiday pageantry, in the West religion is on the decline, along with our society’s emphasis on human relationships. Atheism seems to be getting stronger, estimated at around 13 percent worldwide but much higher in such countries as Japan, Germany and China. “The world is going secular,” claims author Nigel Barber. “Nothing short of an ice age can stop...

In the latest attack on home education, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper has proclaimed that only public schools can educate children to be productive members of society — implying that parents are incapable of educating kids. "Government should do what people individually can't do, or can't do well themselves," the Democrat said in a speech at a luncheon last week. "You know, educating our young people, making sure our roads are designed and built properly, making sure our communities are safe." Most are adamant that by his comment, the governor made it very clear that he believes parents are not capable...

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (December 22, 2014) -- An orangutan that has lived 20 years at the Buenos Aires zoo is entitled to some legal rights enjoyed by humans, an Argentine court has ruled, a decision the ape's attorney called unprecedented and a ticket to greater freedom. The ruling comes a month after a local animal rights group filed a habeas corpus writ in favor of Sandra, who was born in Germany but has lived in captivity in Buenos Aires most of her life. "Following a dynamic ... judicial interpretation, it is necessary to recognize that the animal is subject to...

A PTA of a public school in the Boston area apparently worked behind closed doors to prevent elementary school students from being exposed to the eeeeevil dangers of a...Christmas tree!!! (Cue the impending doom music.) It's gotten so bad that one news report says that one board member may step down over the controversy over the fear of exposing children to secondhand Christmas.Sheesh. The Butler Elementary School PTA made a decision to cancel the annual field trip to see "The Nutcracker" ballet because supposedly some parents complained about the Christmas tree on stage in some scenes. Maybe they should've taken the...

Nine years as chaplain of an 800 bed state mental hospital taught me that one can be mentally ill and highly intelligent. Talking with the patients often was more interesting than talking with their psychiatrists. Mad men are not mindless. They just do not distinguish between delusion and fact. Chesterton summed this up by aphorism: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” This explains why it is often hard to distinguish university faculties from mental wards, save for the latter being kept under...

In case you didn’t know it, if you are a conservative Christian, you are just like Boko Haram and ISIS. At least, that’s what the secularists are saying. More absurd still, they actually believe this.Of course, secularism has been waging war against religion for centuries, but more recently, in America and Europe, the rhetoric of secularism has become more extreme and shrill.When the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, critics complained that the Court’s eminently reasonable decision was “anti-scientific.”As noted by Jonathan Adler in the Washington Post, “The Daily Beast‘s Sally Kohn decried the Court’s reliance on ‘bunk...

SECULARISM The aggressive secularization of America As an American I have watched with sadness, the eroding of our Christian values and standards of living. When I was in grade school, each day was begun with the reading of the Bible, broadcast over the intercom system (yes, we had the technology when I was little). At my graduation from high school, there were two public gatherings in the gym, the first being the baccalaureate service, where the minister chosen by the seniors gave an inspirational address, and religious hymns and patriotic songs were sung. The second public gathering was the actual...

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Cardinal George Pell said working-group reports from the Synod of Bishops on the family finally give a true picture of the assembly's views, counteracting what he characterized as a misleading midterm report. "We wanted the Catholic people around the world to know actually what was going on in talking about marriage and the family and, by and large, I think people will be immensely reassured," Cardinal Pell, prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, told Catholic News Service Oct. 16, the day the reports were published. "We're not giving in to the secular agenda; we're not...

Recent developments make me wonder if Church leaders and Catholic institutions in the U.S. are not, “on the unawares,” helping to further crucial parts of the secularist-leftist political and cultural narrative.Several months ago, on a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border one high-ranking prelate criticized “the xenophobic ranting of a segment of the population” on the immigration question. This summer another prelate spoke about the need to “dismantle systemic racism” in the wake of the events in Ferguson, Missouri. Reacting to the “coming out” of a prominent athlete, another high-ranking prelate spoke approvingly and insisted that the Bible instructs us...

One of the fundamental problems in our society is that we argue with one another from positions of moral parochialism: we assume that the other party shares our frames of reference. That may have been true in the earlier years of our nation, but I propose that this is no longer the case. Today, we argue from different and fundamentally incompatible moral codes and value systems. It is the dichotomy between the two that confuses our discourse and creates great dangers for our country.

It is critical for us who would preach the Gospel to ponder what sorts of presuppositions our listeners bring to the conversation. Today, sadly, there are many trends that have poisoned the culture and make our task much more difficult.But difficult does not mean impossible. And thus it helps to describe modern mindsets, not to despair of them, but to describe them with some insight, rather than be vaguely aware of them. And being more clear on the presuppositions that people bring we can better speak our message and also go to work on those presuppositions and ask people to...

In Iraq, ISIS is bulldozing churches and turned the Cathedral of Mosul into a mosque. Meanwhile, many thousands of miles away…… in the National Post: What’s happening to Montreal’s churches? Quebec finding new ways to preserve its heritage in a secular ageMONTREAL — Weight machines fill the space where once there were pews, and visitors sip nutritional green smoothies, not communion wine. But despite its dramatic transformation into a private gym and spa, the onetime Dominican St. Jude’s Shrine on Montreal’s St. Denis Street remains a temple of sorts.“It becomes almost a religion for some people,” Sonya Audrey Bonin, general...

The downsides of using poll data to understand the arc of historyIn one of the most ambiguous poll questions ever, Gallup has asked Americans to once again act as a tenuous bellwether for the impending death of religion. In a May survey, more than 1,000 people were asked to pick between two vague sense impressions of faith: "Do you believe that religion can answer all of today's problems, or that religion is largely old fashioned and out of date?" Shockingly, only 13 percent of people took the out of answering "no opinion" or "other," which is one way of saying...

Political hysteria has reached a crescendo over a very defined and limited ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby with this week’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision. As many commentators have noted, including the editors at National Review, “That this increase in freedom makes some people so very upset tells us more about them than about the Court’s ruling.”

I have always been a believer. Among other reasons, that’s because I think rationality demands it.When I talk about “belief” here, I mean it in a very broad sense, which is not synonymous with “Catholic” or even “Christian”; Sikhs, Hindus and Zoroastrians might all qualify, and I myself was raised in the LDS church and not (according to Rome’s decree) validly baptized until the age of 25. When I speak here of “believers,” I am distinguishing those who are prepared to believe in more than what eye can see, ear can hear or elaborate scientific machine can detect.I wouldn’t...