by | Jan 24, 2024 | Uncategorized
Is the church ready for a repeat?
After former president Donald Trump bested former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley in New Hampshire on Tuesday, the GOP primary outcome that many have expected all along may soon be here.
“This race consolidated faster than any race I can remember,” Dan Darling, director of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Land Center for Cultural Engagement, told Christianity Today. “It’s feeling a little bit like an incumbent candidacy.”
Haley outlasted a large field of presidential hopefuls, but after a second-place finish in the Granite State, her underdog campaign may soon run out of road, political analysts say.
“New Hampshire has a much more moderate and much less religious electorate than South Carolina, and she still could not win,” said Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst with the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “The bottom line is that I think she needed to do better in New Hampshire to demonstrate wider appeal among the base Republican electorate.”
In New Hampshire, she also performed well with college graduates and self-identifying moderate and independent voters. But nearly 9 in 10 of New Hampshire voters who considered themselves “very conservative” supported Trump, The Washington Post’s exit polling found. And white evangelical Christians—about 20 percent of voters in the contest—went for Trump by 70 percent.
Trump won support from a strong majority of white evangelical voters in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, but his popularity also heightened ideological divisions within churches.
“Christians should be preparing now for a really divisive and contentious campaign season,” …
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by | Jan 23, 2024 | Uncategorized
The downfall of a prominent leader of the Conservative Resurgence—a “dangerous predator” whose behavior was hidden for decades—symbolizes a wider failure to deal with sex abuse and coverup.
Paul Pressler has long been an eminent Texas Republican, having served as a state representative and judge in Houston. He also once served as the first vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, but the title doesn’t capture his true place in the firmament of the SBC.
As one of the architects of the Conservative Resurgence that reshaped the largest US Protestant denomination beginning in the 1970s, he has been hailed for decades as a hero who helped rid SBC churches of a creeping liberalism.
But recently, Gene Besen, a lawyer for the SBC, called Pressler, 93, a “monster” and “a dangerous predator” who leveraged his “power and false piety” to sexually abuse young men even as he was building his reputation as a conservative reformer.
“The man’s actions are of the devil,” Besen said, clarifying that he spoke in his personal capacity and not as a representative of the denomination. “That is clear.”
What makes Pressler’s case so enraging to many Southern Baptists, however, is that his abuse has been detailed for years. A lawsuit, filed by a former Pressler assistant named Gareld Duane Rollins Jr. claiming the older man abused him for decades, has been making its way through the courts since 2017. (The suit, which named Pressler, the SBC, and other Baptist entities, was settled in December.)
In 2004, the year Pressler was first elected vice president, his home church warned in a letter about his habit of naked hot-tubbing with young men after a college student complained that Pressler had allegedly groped him, according to the Texas Tribune. That same year, Pressler agreed to pay $450,000 to settle Rollins’ earlier claim that Pressler had assaulted …
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by | Jan 23, 2024 | Uncategorized
We’ve romanticized stories of destiny-driven love—even at the expense of fidelity. This Oscar-nominated drama shows the beauty of limits.
Last year, I watched The Notebook for the first time. For nearly 25 years, it has epitomized Hollywood romance, with stills of Allie (Rachel McAdams) cupping Noah’s (Ryan Gosling) face as they passionately kiss in the rain serving as a pop culture shorthand for love and destiny.
The Notebook is also a story of infidelity. The story toggles between the present, where an elderly Noah comforts an Alzheimer’s-afflicted Allie, and the 1940s, where Allie cheats on and ultimately leaves her fiancé to reunite with Noah after years apart. In the modern scenes, Noah models faithfulness despite its difficulty, but in the earlier part of their timeline, Allie’s unfaithfulness is presented as the peak of romance.
The 2023 film Past Lives, which was nominated for five Golden Globes and Academy Awards including best picture, subversively shows the extent to which that impermanent perspective has permeated our thinking about life and love. Nora (Greta Lee) lies in bed with her husband Arthur (John Magaro), who is processing his feelings about an upcoming visit from his wife’s former love interest, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo):
Arthur: I was just thinking a lot about what a good story this is.
Nora: The story of Hae Sung and me?
Arthur: Yeah, I just can’t compete.
Nora: What do you mean?
Arthur: Childhood sweethearts who reconnect 20 years later only to realize they were meant for each other.
Nora: We’re not meant for each other.
Arthur: In the story I would be the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny.
“I’m the guy you’re leaving,” Arthur reiterates later, “when your ex-lover comes to take you away.”
Arthur’s confession surely echoes the inner narrative …
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by | Jan 23, 2024 | Uncategorized
The Zone of Interest, nominated for Oscars including best picture, is a Holocaust horror movie about the corruption of the human heart.
The verdant and blooming garden outside the family home in The Zone of Interest, nominated for 2024 Academy Awards including best picture and best director, could appear in some celebrity’s home tour on YouTube. In the yard, the mother swoops her baby down close to sniff various flowers. “This one is phlox,” she says.
But all is not lovely here. Audiences might have a hint from the two minutes of complete darkness that begin this razor-sharp film that something is wrong in this Eden. The family dog sprints anxiously through most of the immaculate shots, grabbing food off the sumptuously set tables and knocking things over. Just over the garden hedge, you can see the puffs of smoke from a train going by. At night, there is a strange red glow on the bedroom walls, and no one seems to be able to sleep.
This is 1944, and the Höss family live in their beautiful home next to the gate of Auschwitz concentration camp, of which Rudolf Höss is the commandant. This part of the story is historical fact: Höss was the real commandant of Auschwitz, responsible for creating an efficient machine for destroying human lives. He later confessed he’d overseen the killing of 3 million people.
But The Zone of Interest, an antiseptic term Nazis used to describe the area around Auschwitz, doesn’t include that kind of historical detail about World War II or the Holocaust. Director Jonathan Glazer, who spent ten years on this project and shot it on location at Auschwitz, knows audiences have seen many such movies and may, by now, be numb to their presentation of those horrors. Instead, he drops the audience straight into the Höss family life as they swim and eat birthday cake. Only slowly do we absorb …
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by | Jan 22, 2024 | Uncategorized
Cringeworthy passages can derail our yearly Bible reading plans. How do we interpret them?
On a recent trip to Egypt, the chefs at our hotel put out a remarkable buffet of culinary delights presented with both excellent taste and exquisite aesthetics.
One of our group members served onto his plate a beautiful spread: a cucumber disc topped with a triangle of cheese, a baby tomato, and a swirl of what looked like a dessert mousse. Sitting back at our table, he took a bite, and his eyes went wide as he grimaced. “What is this?!” he cried. That sweet mousse turned out to be liver pâté—not at all what he was expecting!
It’s the time of the year when many Christians embark on a new Bible reading plan. Reading through the Bible from cover to cover is a wonderful practice that exposes us to its less-familiar passages. We may discover new treasures along the way, tucked between the stories we know.
But we may also encounter passages we’d rather spit out of our mouths, like my friend’s liver pâté. Expecting inspiration, we may instead find hard words, troubling scenes, or confusing episodes. Especially if we hoped for an endorphin-generating Bible study—a “feel-good” devotional to carry us through our day—we can often find ourselves disillusioned.
As a Bible scholar, I’ve devoted my life to reading and understanding the Scriptures. I’ve watched the pages of the Bible come alive over and over again. Even so, I still encounter passages that trouble me. But I keep in mind something another Bible scholar and friend of mine, Esau McCaulley, once said—which is that we should engage with such difficult passages in the same way Jacob interacted with the angel in Genesis 32.
After a lengthy absence, Jacob …
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