Poking the Bear

“A soft answer turns away wrath”, says the writer of Proverbs. I learned that as a child, though I didn’t always use it to my advantage. Still, it’s a good bit of wisdom to have up your sleeve in a confrontation, and too few people today know much about how to de-escalate a conflict.

But what if it’s not your objective to defuse anger? What if you’re looking to provoke a strong emotional reaction?

A Different Package

Yonatan Zunger is a former Distinguished Engineer at Google, a product of Stanford and a very smart guy, so it’s a little surprising to find him making spectacularly unrealistic generalizations like this one: “Anyone can learn how to write code.”

The context of the comment is unimportant and would take way too long to explain, but having spent a significant portion of the last 20 years troubleshooting other people’s rather sad attempts at writing code — or even at manipulating existing code — I almost laughed out loud when I read it.

Still, we should probably cut Mr. Zunger some slack and assume he didn’t mean to make such an absurd and utterly unsupportable claim.

Calls and Feelings

Two weeks ago I posted some thoughts on the “gift of singleness” that didn’t conveniently fit into an earlier post (the one in which John Piper gives advice about marriage to a single mother).

There was another interesting thought-thread associated with the woman’s question, and since Piper hasn’t addressed it, I think it’s time to take a whack at it. It’s this statement I’m referring to:

“Now, as I attempt to wrap my head around the overwhelming task of raising this boy into a man by myself, I do not feel called to marriage.”

“Feeling called” may be a very common evangelical trope, but ask yourself this: Exactly how biblical is it?

Too Hot to Handle: The Christian View of Premarital Sex [Part 1]

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

In an article appropriately entitled “Premarital Sex: Is It A Sin Or Not?” Charles Toy of TheChristianLeft.org contends it’s … not:

“There is no passage of the Bible that references premarital sex as a sin against God. The association between sin and premarital sex is a new Christian idea. The only possible reference to premarital sex being a sin in the Bible is in the New Testament. This premise although, is generally dismissed by theologians because the Greek word pornei, or sexual immorality is commonly incorrectly translated into the English word fornication.”

Tom: Immanuel Can, what say you?

The Positives of Negatives

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Fatal Friends: Dawkins and Calvin

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Freedom: The False and the True

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Do Christians Hate Science?

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Why Are We So Unsatisfied?

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The Mental Scrapbook

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Too Hot to Handle: Eternal Insecurity

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Dismembering the Church

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Hooray for the Hypocrites

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The Mythical Native

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The Trouble with the Truth

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Tom Takes Another ’Nother Breather

You may have noticed I like doing a “retrospective” post once a year, usually on a Sunday in the summer just as I am about to disappear somewhere far away for a couple of weeks and totally ignore the Internet.

It gives me a chance to preview what’s coming for the next week or so, which in 2015 was a Top 10 of our most-read posts, and in 2016 was Worship Week. It also gives me a chance to let our readers know how things are going generally, to say thanks to a few people, and to take stock.

All good things, so let’s have at it.

The Gift of Singleness

This is the first of two extended lines of thought that wouldn’t fit conveniently into my post from two days ago. You may remember that one: John Piper was giving advice to a single mother who wondered if she should be looking for a husband.

A couple of common evangelical catchphrases were bandied around in the exchange and caught my attention. First, Piper referred to the “gift of singleness”. Later, the young woman declared she did not feel “called to marriage”. You have probably heard people say things like that. You may have said them yourself.

Both phrases sorta-kinda employ the language of the New Testament, but both do it in ways that can mislead us if we’re not paying attention to the way they are used.

Too Hot to Handle: Bad Reasons to beNon-Denominational

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Shooting from the Lip

“Pastor John” Piper is answering his mail again, which nearly always ends up, well ... interesting, to say the least.

This time he’s responding to the single mother of a three-year-old boy who wants to know whether the Bible teaches she should be looking for a husband.

Piper is rarely reluctant to engage with questions the Bible doesn’t directly answer, and this one is no exception.

The Multicultural Road to Hell

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