By Dr. Melody Green In his autobiography Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis describes how, when he was a young atheist, he read a book that he described as having “baptized my imagination.” That book was Phantastes, a fantasy novel written by the Victorian Scottish author, pastor and poet George MacDonald. Later, Lewis explains that…
Dr. Andrew Blaski As twenty-first century Christians, we sometimes treat the New Testament as though it were written in a vacuum, without considering how it was received (and indeed, compiled) by those who immediately followed its composition. It doesn’t always occur to us that there were men and women who actually knew the apostles, and that those individuals may…
By Dr. Todd Daly The doctrine of divine election/predestination is too often associated with acrimonious debates between the followers of Calvin and Arminius, debates that not only distort the concept of election but subtly suggest that Christians are better off jettisoning this troubled doctrine altogether. However, this troubled debate often engenders legitimate questions about the…
By Dr. Melody Green For the last month, now, each of these blog posts have been about one author, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. If you have been paying the least bit of attention to these, you will know that on Saturday, February first, Urbana Theological Seminary will be hosting its second conference on Tolkien. You…
written by Dr. Melody Green In 2000 and 2001, several magazines, newspapers, and publishers put together lists of the “best” authors of the twentieth century. While these lists were organized in different ways and focused on different criteria, J. R. R. Tolkien frequently showed up near the top, if not at the very top, of…
written by Dave Berry, pastor at Jacob’s Well Community Church In a hole in the ground there lived… millions of miserable men. The years were 1914 – 1918 and The War to End All Wars had devolved into a war of attrition, disease, and all the horror and killing effectiveness the technology of the day could bring….
written by Melody Green, Adjunct Instructor at Urbana Seminary On Nov 22, 2012, it was announced in England that next year the author C. S. Lewis will be memorialized in Westminster Abbey, where kings and queens of England are crowned, married, and buried. In “Poet’s Corner,” a small area of the thousand-year-old-building, various poets, authors…
written by Dr. Joe Thomas If one happened to have crossed Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s path in 1935, it would not have been inconceivable to picture him someday as a German Gandhi. Bonhoeffer was young, brilliant, filled with boundless energy, a pacifist, committed to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, dedicated to the marginalized everywhere, and diametrically opposed…
written by Dr. Joe Thomas, Assistant Professor of History of Christianity “You’ll see the day, ten years from now, when Adolf Hitler will occupy precisely the same position in Germany that Jesus Christ has now.” Reinhard Heydrich, high ranking Nazi official and one of the main architects of the Holocaust “…the Nazi regime intended eventually to…
written by Dr. Joe Thomas, Assistant Professor of History of Christianity A local church recently invited me to speak on the topic of Dietrich Bonhoeffer at a Sunday scholarly luncheon they hold each year. Bonhoeffer has entered into the 20th century popular Christian lexicon as an inspiring theologian, ethicist and martyr. His books on the…
