Podcast Pick of the Week: On Gospelbound, this conversation between Andy Crouch and Collin Hansen on the future of our culture post-Covid is full of wisdom, insight, and hope.
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Seven of the best articles I came across this week:
1. Y Bonesteele – How the Growing Global Church Can Encourage American Christians. Even through a pandemic, God is moving. He’s always moving and growing His Kingdom, not despite traumatic events, but through them. All around the world we have seen God continue to make Himself known, grow His disciples, and bring good news to a world yearning for hope.
2. Jay Kim – Should Online ‘Church’ Continue After the Pandemic? Online technology has held us together tenuously. But it’s not enough. There is grieving, rejoicing, feasting, and everything in between to be done—together, embodied, and fully present as one.
3. Shadi Hamid in The Atlantic – America Without God. As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen. Will the quest for secular redemption through politics doom the American idea?
4. Sophia Lee – With Equity—and Diversity—For All? One side sees unequal results as a sign of inequity and believes government and society have a moral and intellectual mandate to eliminate it. The other side, while acknowledging problems, argues that human efforts cannot eradicate them and warns the unintended consequences would be worse than the solution. Such different views lead to completely different approaches.
5. Jared Wilson – Lemuel Haynes and the Right Preaching of Justice. Lemuel Haynes is one of the most significant figures in American (and Church) history that most people have never heard of.
6. James Meigs – Trust, But Verify, the Science. “When people admonish me to Trust the Science, what I hear sounds less like science and more like faith. They aren’t asking me to accept a scientific conclusion about how the world works, but to accept their preferred prescription for how to change it.”
7. Erin Banco – Virus drove record U.S. death rate in 2020. The U.S. death rate increased by 15 percent last year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, making it the deadliest year in recorded U.S. history. See also The Dispatch – Could We Be Looking at a Vaccine Glut? Soon, we’ll have enough supply to administer 4 million shots a day. We need to ramp up the processes for getting shots into arms.