Discipleship in the Present Tense: Reflections on Faith and Culture

to be both pressed and stretched, located at the intersection of church and world, past and future, ancient and modern, memory and hope.

To be faithful in the present is

it anew as a visual metaphor for this project. Finally, I’m a grateful to Deanna: for understanding that this kind of writing is what eats up evenings and weekends,

What’s “believable” has changed, and what we have always believed has been challenged. In response to this, some are eager to offer “updated” versions of Christian faith, revisionist versions of the gospel that are more acceptable, less scandalous—more relevant and less offensive.

To live at that intersection is to be caught up in the life of our incarnating God, who at the fullness of time intersected with history and now invites us, ever anew, to be his contemporaries.

Faithfulness requires knowing the difference between authentic extensions versus assimilative adaptations.

faith and doubt.

the Christian public intellectual needs to be a kind of ethnographer, offering a “thick description” of our present,

Everything in this book is animated by the conviction that the tradition of Christian orthodoxy is a gift, not a liability—a resource for the future, not an embarrassment that we should be trying to sweep under the carpet or tuck away in a back room like a crazy uncle.