How I Evolved on Tim Keller | James R. Wood

“To insist that the universe be run like a Western democracy was actually a very ethnocentric point of view,” he told me.

Secular reason, all by itself, cannot give us a basis for “sacrifice, redemption, and forgiveness,” as Paul Kalanithi concluded in his final months.

(A major issue that conservatives even today have yet to solve is how, in opposing the reductions of the immanent frame, they can avoid the perception of being against justice and mercy and can support all humans flourishing.)

Soon enough, the most central question for both mainline and evangelical pastors was, How can we reach more and more people? They did not ask how they could testify to God’s eternity breaking into time. They asked how they could keep from losing pace up against the threat of secular 2.

“On reflection,” confesses Eugene Peterson, “I realized that I had become busy, a bastard form of ambition.”

“In the face of recent revelations about the reckless and self-indulgent sexual conduct of so many of our elected officials, it may be worth recalling that sexual restraint rather than sexual prowess was once the measure of a man.”33

In the evangelical subcultures I had inhabited, the general disposition towards sources of knowledge and wisdom outside of the boundaries of our doctrinal fences was one of suspicion, if not complete derision and distrust. But this was not the disposition of some of the earliest orthodox Christian voices, nor has it been the perspective of some of