Today is the 300th day of 2015. There are 65 days left in the year.
(1) Christianity was the only way out, says North Korean defector: Joseph Kim revered the Great Leader as a child, but on arriving in China he realised that if he embraced Jesus missionaries would help him escape, by Ed Pilkington (Guardian)
(2) C.S. Lewis’s Tip for Our Times, by Joel Miller (Ancient Faith)
“How do we ensure we’re not mindlessly swerving along with the wider culture and dragging our faith along for the ride? Lewis offers one very simple and helpful response. Contemporaries unwittingly share many of the same assumptions. “None of us can fully escape this blindness,” says Lewis, “but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our own guard against it, if we read only modern books.” And we can expand “books” there to include publications of all sorts: blogs, news sites, whatever. “The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries”—different contexts with different assumptions—“blowing through our minds, says Lewis, “and this can be done only by reading old books.” Future books might work just as well, he says, but Barnes and Noble doesn’t stock them yet.”
(3) Do Churches Practice Age Discrimination in Hiring?: Six general trends I’ve seen, by Thom Rainer
(4) David Was a Rapist, Abraham a Sex Trafficker, David Lamb (Christianity Today)
“Scripture teaches us that God works in and through messed up people—even ones with some of the worst sexual baggage we can imagine. Scripture doesn’t avoid talking about sexual violence. Nor does it use euphemisms to soften the severity of sexual abuse. It presents reality as it is. Sin has tragic consequences. But God works in and through consequences to work out redemption.”
(5) The Full Story on Ben Carson’s Faith, by Mark Kellner (USA Today)
And, Ben Carson Is Right to Compare Abortion with Slavery, by David French (National Review)
(bonus) Highly religious Americans are less likely than others to see conflict between faith and science, by Pew Research Center (Cary Funk and Becka A. Alper)
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