This Thursday and Friday (May 17 and 18) the School of English at the University of St Andrews will be hosting an international conference on Harry Potter called, “A Brand of Fictional Magic: Reading Harry Potter as Literature.” Today I am leaving Las Vegas to return to Scotland...

Last week, President Barack Obama affirmed his personal support for gay marriage, pushing the issue into the political spotlight once again. Of course, it’s much more than politics. It’s a spiritual issue, too. When faced with the question of gay marriage, Christians will often rattle off...

We, The Biola Queer Underground, are a group of like-minded LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) students and allies who have formed a private underground community in which we share our life struggles, as well as our love and support for one another. The main problems that...

Last weekend, numerous people throughout the country collectively invested $200.3 M into 2 hours and 23 minutes of their time. This investment was the purchase of a movie ticket to escape the world of reality to play in the super-hero fantasy world of The Avengers. I’ll confess: I tossed a...

I don’t know what to think about church growth anymore.  I’ve always believed it’s God that causes a church to grow–and I still do.  But what role does the leadership of the church play in bringing more people in?  I’m afraid the answer to this question...

The new issue of JETS (Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 55/1 [2012]) is now available. I co-wrote one of the articles with one of my professors from Biola, Dr. Jonathan M. Lunde. The article is titled, “Paul’s Creative & Contextual use of Isaiah in Ephesians...

Last week I watched a few episodes of “Beyond Scared Straight,” the reality show that follows a group of rebellious teens to prison, where they get a taste of life behind bars. Aside from being thoroughly entertained, I learned a lot about false hopes and society’s view of...

“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” –Albert Einstein Anders Behring Breivik looks almost ghostly. In every picture that I see of him, he appears serious and menacing and totally unrepentant. This repentance he lacks should be for the murder of...

As fun as flannel-gram Bible stories were, I always found it frustrating (especially when trying to teach with them) that so often, you are short the people and the objects necessary to tell the entire story. Sometimes you just don’t have enough Galilean common folk to make two crowds, or...

Yesterday Albert Mohler published an article at his website entitled, “Is the Megachurch the New Liberalism?”  The article–or at least its title–inspired megachurch pastor Rick Warren to tweet, “@albertmohler A TITLE questioning 1000s of churches’ orthodoxy...