by | Jan 8, 2024 | Uncategorized
A number of schools are trying various methods of not charging tuition, born out of their convictions about debt and hopes for students to choose a Christian education.
As Christian schools adapt their education models to an unfriendly market, several are experimenting with offering free tuition to some or all of their students.
Starting this semester, Sattler College, a small Anabaptist college in Boston, announced that it will not be charging any of its students tuition. The president, Zack Johnson, said some students came to his office in tears of happiness after the announcement.
Uriah O’Terry is a sophomore at Sattler, and the first in his family to go to college. He said in past semesters finding the money for tuition was “a point of stress,” and he had to take out a loan. He’s happy for the change.
“I am being prepared for a life of effective Christian living without the burden of debt,” he said in an email. “So the way I pay for my ‘free’ college education is by serving Jesus and the people around me with the skills and knowledge that I have gained at Sattler.”
Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, also announced that in fall 2024 it would not charge tuition for Pennsylvania students whose families make under $70,000 a year. In fall 2023, Grace College in Winona Lake, Indiana, began offering free tuition to Indiana students whose families make less than $65,000. That program will continue next school year, now for families making less than $60,000.
Hope College in Holland, Michigan, is in its third year of a pilot program to offer free tuition. It is currently covering tuition for a small group of students who go through a character-based application as it tries to raise funds to cover more and more of its students.
“The reception has been a wide range of things from people who are inspired by it to people who think …
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by | Jan 8, 2024 | Uncategorized
And what I wish I had considered before reproductive assistance.
When evangelicals speak of the unborn, they’re often thinking of babies growing inside pregnant moms. Even the pro-life mantra of “from womb to tomb” presupposes a womb to carry them.
So as record numbers of Americans grow their families through in vitro fertilization (IVF), Christians who believe that life begins at conception—even if that’s in a petri dish—face new questions and challenges. In response to expanding reproductive technology, pro-life evangelicals are reexamining the theological and ethical concerns around creating and caring for life at its earliest stages.
I wish I had thought more deeply about this in 2015, when I began IVF in a desperate move to become a mother after several years of infertility. But even as a pro-life Christian, I thought primarily of the lives I would carry, not the ethical ramifications of potential leftover embryos. In fact, I wasn’t even aware one could make so many embryos at once, and the doctors at my IVF clinic didn’t inform me of it.
Other Christians whose beliefs about life did come to bear on their journeys through fertility assistance have experienced the tension firsthand. I talked with Jamie Skipper, who began to consider treatments to help get pregnant around 15 years ago. Her staunch pro-life convictions immediately made things harder.
The Skippers were committed to limiting the number of embryos. If each one created was a new life, they didn’t want any “extras” to sit in a freezer or get destroyed in the process. But IVF is a physically demanding and expensive process, so doctors often recommend fertilizing multiple eggs for a higher chance that one will develop into a healthy baby.
Jamie Skipper said finding …
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by | Jan 5, 2024 | Uncategorized
Leaders reflect on what YouVersion list of the most-shared Scriptures in their nation includes—and misses.
The most popular verses for Brazilians in 2023 focused on the provision of God.
Those digitally cracking open their Bibles were most likely to search Joshua 1:9, followed by Jeremiah 29:11 and Isaiah 41:10, according to YouVersion.
Valdemar Kroker, who pastors Igreja Irmãos Menonitas in Curitiba, a city of nearly two million in southern Brazil, found the results unsurprising.
“It’s not surprise to me that Joshua 1:9 is the top verse,” he said. “I’ve heard my father sing this passage countless times.”
Nearly all the verses that made Brazil’s Top 10 are Old Testament texts that ring with a sense of “promise,” according to Paulo Won, a Presbyterian pastor, theology professor, and content creator.
“The focus is on what God can do in us, in the sense of granting us victories in life, more than on how we can be molded to God’s will, and thus live the discipleship that presupposes eventual difficulties and tribulations,” he said. “It’s a clear diagnosis that our way of living the gospel is largely triumphalist.”
The appearance of these verses suggest that Christians aren’t learning the Bible as a “grand narrative” or always being given the larger context of where these words come from, says Cynthia Muniz, a biologist and theologian.
“The Brazilian evangelical scene itself has been strongly influenced by triumphalist theologies, so that some of these texts can be understood as personal promises of prosperity and victory, including material ones,” she said.
YouVersion’s apps include tools designed to help people read the Bible more frequently and pray more regularly. These were downloaded …
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by | Jan 5, 2024 | Uncategorized
A Protestant considers a Catholic theologian’s call for an “ecclesial” reading of Scripture.
On November 10, 1942, following a British victory in Egypt during World War II, Winston Churchill famously quipped, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
I thought about those words as I opened The End of Interpretation: Reclaiming the Priority of Ecclesial Exegesis, a recent book from Catholic theologian and First Things editor R. R. Reno. Just as Churchill saw that victory as a decisive turning point in the war in North Africa, Reno sees a renewed synthesis between Scripture and doctrine as a path forward through the crisis of our cultural moment.
The book hovers around an essential question: “How,” Reno asks, “do we square doctrine with Scripture?” On the surface, this might sound like an odd question to pose. Aren’t Scripture and doctrine the clearest of allies? Aren’t they two parts of the harmonious whole of Christian witness? For most believers, surely, there is no obvious tension between them. But in seminary classrooms, the topic tends to launch impassioned debates.
In advocating a new synthesis between Scripture and doctrine, Reno is responding to a gradual division during the 20th century among those who engage in serious study of the Bible and theology—a rupture he considers harmful and unnatural. In broad outline, the task of biblical exegesis (understanding the objective meaning of Scripture in its literary, historical, and canonical contexts) has come unglued from the task of theology (constructing authoritative doctrine that distills the Bible’s teachings on God and man).
As Reno makes clear, this state of affairs has an important institutional component. For too long, the traditional …
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by | Jan 5, 2024 | Uncategorized
The gospel doesn’t come with a gag order. It calls us to name and repent of idolatries and hypocrisies—especially our own.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
A year or so ago, my friend David French and I were speaking to a group of young congressional staffers on Capitol Hill when one young man, a Republican and an evangelical Christian, asked us why we would criticize what’s happening right now on the Right.
“With all the hostility coming toward Christians from secularism and progressive ideology,” he asked, “why not punch Left instead of Right?”
Quite often, one will hear this sort of complaint from professing evangelical Christians—often in response to some conversation-generating book, such as Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne or Tim Alberta’s new work The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory. These objections are often couched in terms of maintaining the “unity of the church,” usually picturing those evangelicals who dissent from Christian nationalism or white identity politics as betrayers, with an unspoken subtext: “The first rule of Born-Again Club is that we don’t talk about Born-Again Club.”
Sometimes this critique will extend all the way to the series of scandals issuing from American evangelical Christianity, at times with the argument that evangelicals “attacking our own side” on such matters will only cause unbelievers to hate us more and Christians to trust their leaders less.
This argument is akin to the “No Enemies to the Left” policy of some sectors of American progressivism in the middle of the last century toward the Soviet Union and Communist totalitarianism. One might whisper that Joseph Stalin is awful, but saying so publicly would only make the case for authoritarian anti-Communists. …
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