by | Jul 31, 2024 | Uncategorized
The organizers deny their tableau referenced Da Vinci’s Last Supper. But the imagery speaks volumes about the spiritual needs of our confused society.
The controversy over the Paris Olympics’ alleged mockery of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper during the opening ceremony takes us all the way back to ancient Greece. Not to Olympia, the site of the original Games, but to Athens, as documented by the evangelist Luke in Acts 17. Then, as now, Christians had to navigate a tragic misunderstanding of the Good News, and the apostle Paul’s patience with the foolishness of the Greeks (1 Cor. 1:23) just might come in handy as we watch the 2024 Games.
For many years, I assumed that Paul must have commended the religiosity of the superstitious Athenians with his tongue firmly in his cheek. But the longer I spend with this story, the more I believe my initial reading to be wrong. Just read verses 22 and 23:
Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: To An Unknown God. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.”
There’s no sarcasm here. Paul seems genuine in his praise. Despite the fact that the city’s numerous idols “greatly distressed” him (v. 16), he found something to admire and used the Athenians’ extreme superstition as an opening for the gospel. Could we try the same with Paris?
But, first, I must concede that the artistic choices made with this tableau are undeniably awkward, seriously shortsighted about audience reception, and distasteful at best. I understand why many Christians were offended—though I must also note that evidence …
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by | Jul 31, 2024 | Uncategorized
Christians in America enjoy the right and duty to educate our children as conscience dictates, thanks to a balanced legal tradition.
When the COVID-19 pandemic pushed K–12 schooling online and gave public school parents a new window into how and what their children were learning, a nationwide debate erupted. Public curricula on race, class, and gender and the role of parents in shaping their children’s education came under scrutiny as they hadn’t for two decades.
By 2023, 22 states had implemented parental rights or curriculum transparency laws or executive orders, to varying results. In Maryland, Muslim and Christian parents sued their local school board for not allowing them to opt their elementary-aged kids out of mandatory LGBTQ story hours. In the state of Washington, the recent “Parental Rights initiative”—requiring public schools to release children’s medical records to their parents—is being challenged in the courts.
Meanwhile, homeschooling is now the fastest-growing form of education in the country. Once illegal in many states and associated with white, religious conservatives, it is increasingly ethnically, religiously, and politically diverse. Some parents are (wisely) taking it on a kid-by-kid, year-by-year basis.
How did we get here? And how should Christians—especially those who want to both train up their children in the way they should go (Prov. 22:6) and seek the welfare of their city (Jer. 29:7)—think about the potential tension between the right of parents to direct their children’s education and the role of the state and wider community in forming educated citizens?
William Blackstone’s 1765 commentary on English common law is the seminal text on parental rights in the Anglo-American constitutional tradition. It begins not with the radical …
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by | Jul 31, 2024 | Uncategorized
Translation and digitization projects are seeking to revitalize the Indigenous language.
Kenny Wallace doesn’t have a lot of people to talk to in Choctaw.
But he does have a Bible app with a new translation of Scripture in the Indigenous language that his ancestors spoke. And it has an audio sync feature that allows him to listen to the words aloud, to hear how they sound.
“Sometimes, that’s the only Choctaw voice I ever hear,” Wallace told CT. “Not only is it feeding my soul, but it’s actually feeding me culturally as well.”
Wallace, an African American Choctaw Pawnee, said his family was cut off from their Indigenous heritage by racism and geographic distance. He officially started the journey to reclaim his heritage in 2008, beginning with language. To know where he came from, he knew he wanted to understand Choctaw.
He started by getting an old Bible translated in the 1800s and learning words from it. But when Wallace, a teacher and worship pastor who lives in Canada, started interacting with other Choctaw speakers, he learned he’d picked up some peculiar vocabulary—old religious words, a little out of date.
Then he found a new version started by the Choctaw Bible Translation Committee. It came with an app, which had the audio sync feature that allowed him to listen to Scripture as his ancestors might have heard it.
“The app has been such a blessing for me,” he said. “Language is probably the largest carrier of culture.”
The Choctaw Bible translation project is still in progress. So far, portions of Matthew, Mark, and Luke have been translated, along with 2 Corinthians, the three epistles of John, and a few of the shorter Old Testament books, including Amos and Jonah.
“The heart of a culture is in its language,” said T. Christopher …
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by | Jul 30, 2024 | Uncategorized
Survey: Majority Asian churches are half as likely to have leaders under 30.
One of the first spiritual formation books written for Asian American Christians, released by InterVarsity Press in 1998, is entitled Following Jesus Without Dishonoring Your Parents. Even in its title, the book acknowledges how Asian Americans’ faith and discipleship are inextricably intertwined with family and culture. Questions of calling, mission, church community, and spiritual practices are often seen through the cross-generational lens of family obligation and cultural heritage—resulting in complex perspectives on ministry and discipleship.
This layered lens on faith begins to shed light on a major finding in the recent National Survey of Asian American Congregational Leadership Practices by the Innovative Space for Asian American Christianity (ISAAC): Of the more than 200 Asian American (or majority Asian American) congregations surveyed, about 35 percent reported no leaders under the age of 30 on the ruling church board. This is more than double the number of non-Asian congregations in the survey who reported a lack of young leaders on their board.
The ISAAC survey finding also aligns with broader church studies that show how many congregations are aging and fewer young people are identifying as Christian. But, within the Asian American context, the lack of young leaders points to significant theological and cultural differences between the generations that affect communal identity, missional priorities, leadership diversity, and pastoral succession.
Steve Wong, who is the founding pastor of a small Asian American congregation in Silicon Valley, says that churches like his are often asking, “Who are we serving, actually?” It’s not a simple question when the term Asian American encompasses …
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by | Jul 30, 2024 | Uncategorized
Presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed a month before the 2018 election. Polarization and Christian nationalism has only grown since then.
On September 6, 2018, the eve of Brazil’s Independence Day, a crowd of people was carrying Jair Bolsonaro through the streets of Juiz de Fora when a man approached and stabbed the then-presidential candidate in the abdomen.
Bolsonaro was rushed to the hospital; the knife had damaged his small intestine and a nearby vein, causing heavy internal bleeding. The injuries kept him in the hospital for more than three weeks during the heat of the presidential campaign.
“God acted and deflected the knife,” said Bolsonaro’s son Flávio within hours of the event.
Though Bolsonaro didn’t exit the attack on his life with a fist pump and look of defiance, his recovery from the assassination attempt nevertheless energized his base and grew his supporters, including among significant numbers of evangelical Christians, who would propel him to the presidency a couple months later.
Just weeks before the attack, polls showed 26 percent of Brazilian evangelicals, which includes both mainstream Protestants as well as neo-Pentecostals, backing Bolsonaro. After the stabbing, that number rose to 36 percent. By the first round of elections on October 7, 48 percent of evangelicals voted for Bolsonaro, a number that increased to 69 percent during his winning November run-off.
Prior to the incident, Bolsonaro had not been shy in his attempts to court the evangelical vote. Journalist Ricardo Alexandre notes in his book E a Verdade Vos Libertará: Reflexões Sobre Religião, Política e Bolsonarismo:
In August 2018, during an interview with GloboNews, the then-candidate declared, “I am a Christian,” and, suggesting the supernatural nature of his success, continued, “Look at the popular …
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