by | Jan 5, 2024 | Uncategorized
Harvard president Claudine Gay has resigned. Perhaps it’s not time to think less of Harvard, but to think of Harvard less.
On Tuesday, I received an email from the president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, announcing her decision to resign. It was addressed to “members of the Harvard community,” to which I belong as an alumnus (MDiv ’14) and a Harvard chaplain for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.
Harvard is a community I care about deeply. And the last few months have demonstrated that many other people care deeply about Harvard too—people well beyond the list Gay emailed. Her announcement came after a series of Harvard-centered media frenzies, some about Gay’s December congressional testimony and subsequent plagiarism allegations, and some about student groups’ response to the horrific Hamas attacks of October 7 and the ensuing Israel-Hamas war.
I’ve been asked many times for my opinion of what’s happening, and, initially, my instinct was to provide the nuance those headlines always seem to miss. But as the stories kept coming, increasingly, I’ve found myself giving a different answer: Perhaps you should care about Harvard less.
In one sense, the interest was understandable. This round of media attention started with a truly reprehensible statement by a Harvard student organization after October 7, a statement that laid all blame for the violence on Israel and that was signed by a number of other student groups.
I raised an eyebrow when I saw it, but I also know firsthand what student groups can be like: passionate, informal, chaotic. I would later learn that some groups were surprised to see their name attached to the statement, and others had not seen the statement before it was published.
This is going to cause a stir on campus, I thought.
Boy, was I wrong. It did not just cause a stir …
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by | Jan 5, 2024 | Uncategorized
Peachtree Publishing Services reviews 80 percent of Protestant Bibles in the US, looking at 300,000 details in each project.
When Jan Gibbs began proofreading Bibles 14 years ago for Peachtree Publishing Services, which celebrated in December the distribution of a billion copies of its works, she first had to learn to draw lines.
In the Bible’s poetry books in particular, primary, secondary and tertiary vertical lines designate the indentation for each horizontal line of text. Line placement must match the translators’ desires to a tee.
Mastering poetry alignment, she moved to proofreading running heads to conform to each publisher’s order. Then footnotes. Then word breaks.
Cumbersome to many, to Gibbs it’s mother’s milk.
“I find it fascinating,” said Gibbs, who today is Peachtree’s vice president of Bible proofreading. “My husband said that this would absolutely drive him insane.”
When proofreading God’s inerrant Word, there’s no room for error.
Peachtree proofreads 80 percent of the English Protestant Bibles in the US, proofreads many Catholic Bibles and serves publishers worldwide, Peachtree president Chris Hudson told Baptist Press.
“We are making sure everything is as perfect as can be,” he said. “We want people to find God when they read the Bible, not find a mistake.”
But surely, with so many details in play, someone must have made an error somewhere in Peachtree’s history, one could presume.
“We don’t get a lot of feedback of mistakes. Mostly we’re catching lots of mistakes before it’s printed,” Hudson said. “Every step along the way gets looked at at least twice by different people. Through our electronic and our people checks we’re catching most things. But we are human, so occasionally we’ll get …
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by | Jan 4, 2024 | Uncategorized
How a contested alien abduction claim from the 1960s helps explain modern cynicism toward credentialed experts and organizations.
A friend recently recounted a horrible flying experience full of delays, obfuscating explanations, and eventual cancellations. We concluded that one of the most infuriating parts of modern travel is that there is no single person to blame when it falls apart. Most likely, it’s not a failure of this specific pilot or that particular mechanic or this or that airline. It is truly systemic, with a hundred moving processes, none of which have overriding authority over the others.
You can lose your cool in the terminal, but what power does any single employee really hold? You can curse the universe, but alas, it is not moved. If you are a Christian, you can utter a prayer for mercy—I’ve petitioned for such travel miracles but never experienced one myself. It all makes your jaw clench and your stomach turn.
Americans today seem to be in a similar situation as the stranded passenger, directing our rage both in focused and indiscriminate ways across our society, which many see as falling apart.
Since the 1960s, public trust in all types of institutions has plummeted. Since Gallup started tracking survey results, faith in the US Congress has dropped to 8 percent, with newspapers rating at 18 percent, banks at 26 percent, and organized religious institutions at 32 percent. According to these metrics, most institutions have bottomed out in the last two years. Overall, American confidence in institutions has fallen from 48 percent in 1979 to 26 percent in 2023.
Explanations are many and varied. To make sense of the collapsing trust in government, we often cite events like the Watergate scandal and trends of party polarization. Loss of trust in business is often attributed to scandals like Enron and the 2008 banking crisis. …
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by | Jan 3, 2024 | Uncategorized
The Methodist minister and founder of American Family Association mobilized believers to exert economic influence on major corporations.
Donald Wildmon, a Methodist minister who seized on the idea that boycotts would be the best way to make America more moral, freeing television airwaves of suggestions of sex and anti-Christian bias, died on December 28. He was 85 and suffered from Lewy body disease, a type of dementia.
Wildmon organized and mobilized Christians across the country, convincing them that they should exert their combined economic power to influence what was on TV.
Through a succession of organizations he founded in Tupelo, Mississippi—the National Federation for Decency, the Coalition for Better Television, Christian Leaders for Responsible Television, and ultimately the American Family Association—he taught the Religious Right to embrace boycotts as a political tool. Before him, boycotts were primarily associated with the civil rights movement. Many conservatives considered them anti-capitalist, coercive, and un-American. Wildmon changed that.
“What we are up against is not dirty words and dirty pictures,” he said. “It is a philosophy of life which seeks to remove the influence of Christians and Christianity from our society.”
Wildmon also refined and developed boycotting strategies, learning to go after advertisers, rather than TV networks, for maximal effect.
He and his organizations objected to the depictions of sexual situations and suggestions of immorality on All in the Family; Almost Grown; Amen; Benson; Charlie’s Angels; Cheers; The Dukes of Hazzard; Dynasty; The Facts of Life; Family Ties; Full House; and The Golden Girls (going alphabetically); as well as Knight Rider; Knots Landing; L. A. Law; Magnum, P. I.; Matlock; Murder, She Wrote; Saturday Night Live; Three’s Company; Three’s …
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by | Jan 3, 2024 | Uncategorized
We love celebrity conversions, but this obsession may not be as gospel-centered as it seems.
We love Christian celebrities. And by that I don’t only mean speakers and pastors who gain celebrity status in the Christian world. I mean famous celebrities in secular spaces—think Justin Bieber, Kanye West, Daddy Yankee, or the latest, Hulk Hogan—who publicly convert or make a profession of faith.
In one sense, this rejoicing is good and right, an extension of the “rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15:10). But applauding celebrity professions of faith from afar is not quite the same as rejoicing when witnessing true repentance. And if we’re not careful, we can end up grasping at straws, looking for the subtlest of signs that our favorite famous figures are believers—even if they’re bearing little to no fruit (Matt. 7:15–20).
This habit of looking for Christians in high places is popular across cultural and political lines. Our family watched football games together when I was a kid, and whenever a player pointed to the sky after a touchdown, my mom would say (sometimes joking, sometimes not), “I bet he’s a Christian!” She and my sisters do the same thing now with K-pop band members, and I once had a roommate who was lowkey obsessed with Justin Bieber and regularly prayed for his salvation.
Believers on both sides of the political aisle are eager to prove that their favorite politicians are really and truly saved—like those who claim former president Donald Trump was (repeatedly) led in the sinner’s prayer, or those who point to President Joe Biden’s Mass attendance as a sign of genuine faith.
This past fall, as soon as news spread of actor Matthew Perry’s passing, Christians started …
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