Author: Chris Boyd

Recognized for the promotion of women’s rights and inclusive education, two leading figures relate civil war struggles and the challenge of special needs.

Lebanese Baptists have reason to be proud. This month, two senior members of their community, Mona Khauli and Nabil Costa, were recognized for their faith-based work on behalf of their nation.

Mona Khauli, the 85-year-old executive director of the national Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), was honored by the Baptist World Alliance (BWA) for her human rights work.

“Honor comes from God,” she said. “Having been in his service all these years, I do not need any from people.” She did, however, note her acceptance may be useful to inspire others.

Costa, general secretary of the Association of Evangelical Schools in Lebanon (AESL), was locally recognized with the inaugural Créel Award as one of the top luminaries hailing from his nation’s southern region for pioneering leadership in special needs education.

“As a son of Maghdoucheh, I am pleased to be honored here,” he said of his Greek Catholic agricultural village, located five miles southeast of Sidon, which hosted the ceremony. “But our victory comes only from the Lord.”

Khauli experienced such triumph firsthand amid constant loss due to the civil war.

Assuming her role in 1977 following many years of volunteering, Khauli was immediately plunged into the reality of ongoing bombardment in Muslim-dominated West Beirut. So she turned the YWCA headquarters into a women’s hostel, receiving displaced Lebanese of all religious confessions.

The Syrian general occupying their neighborhood assigned his men to mount a missile launcher on YWCA’s strategically-placed rooftop. Khauli rushed to confront him. We have women here, she told him. Would you accept men running through the quarters of your mother and …

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Sweden’s desecration of Islam’s holy book has prompted a bid to burn the Bible. European evangelicals condemn the offense but link the freedoms of expression and religion.

Swedish evangelicals fear a human rights retreat, as the fallout continues from last month’s Quran burning.

Earlier this month, Iraq expelled the Swedish ambassador after Swedish police authorized the burning of the Torah and the Bible in front of the Israeli embassy in Stockholm—though the Muslim applicant did not go through with it.

“If I burn the Torah, another the Bible, another the Quran, there will be war here,” stated Ahmad A. “What I wanted to show is that it’s not right to do it.”

Though unintentional, he succeeded in showing the neutrality of Swedish law. There was scant outcry from Christians to protect their Scripture, but overall many Swedes are sympathetic to his plea. More than half favor prohibition of the burning of any religious books, up from 42 percent in February.

To do so may require reviving blasphemy laws that were scrapped in the 1970s. Following a similar incident last year, the former prime minister of Sweden stated such acts should be prosecuted as hate speech, lamenting the waste of budget to protect rogue actors. And after this round of international outcry, the government announced that it is currently exploring if such a law can be passed.

But across the European continent, Christian leaders are expressing alarm.

“If you can’t burn the Quran, can you put it in the toilet?” asked Olof Edsinger, general secretary of the Swedish Evangelical Alliance. “There are many ways of desecration, and you can’t stop them all.”

Fully condemning the offense itself, he clarifies that any law—however broadly worded—would be tailored only for the religious community that is offended. The issue is with Muslim reaction, he says, and …

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For Christians, Greta Gerwig’s latest film is an opportunity to reckon with the “fortunate fall.”

Questions about gender and sexuality plague the evangelical church, from the SBC to the PCA. Books on the topic are proliferating. In that context, it’s understandable that some folks see the new Barbie film as another volley in the gender wars. But Greta Gerwig’s latest project is far too layered to be read through a literalist hermeneutic.

Rather than offering a blind affirmation of feminism or a critique of patriarchy, the movie explores how we use ideology to bypass the messier work of growing as humans. The gender wars are not the plot so much as the setting. They shape the world in which Barbie and Ken pursue maturity.

Consider Ken’s character arc. Forever condemned to be “just Ken,” Barbie’s beau finds his identity through relationship to her. He “simps,” or fawningly submits to her, by following her into the Real World. Once there, however, he catches a vision for a different life—one where men rule but more importantly feel seen and valued. Crediting this to The Patriarchy™, Ken carries the idea of male superiority back to Barbie Land as a shortcut to his own growth.

The movie tracks with Christine Emba’s recent observations that modern men are in “a widespread identity crisis—as if they didn’t know how to be.” This loss of self, she argues, is what fuels the popularity of right-wing masculinity gurus from Jordan Peterson to Andrew Tate. Those voices seem to offer young men a path forward. That it so often trends toward misogyny, as Ken’s own journey does, is only part of the point.

Eventually, Ken reckons with the roots of his discontent, which are less about social order and more about an abdication of self through …

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Communal suffering has to be reckoned with. And so does God’s healing word.

A few weeks ago, I arrived at the airport a little early to pick up a friend and decided to pull over in the emergency lane to wait. I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, but there were 20 cars already there, so I figured my decision wasn’t too bad.

Moments later, however, I heard a siren and saw police car lights in my rearview mirror.

Without warning, my hands began to tremble, my breathing quickened, and my legs started to shake. I called my husband and told him what was happening. My body was going into full-fledged panic mode.

As the officer approached, I could barely catch my breath. Images of Black men and women shot for minor offenses raced through my mind. Would I be labeled as a criminal who broke the law, or as a mother, wife, and minister who served the Lord? Would I be lumped into the countless names of Black people who have died for misdemeanors, or would I be among the privileged few who escaped alive?

By the time the officer came near to my car, I could barely see. He stood at a short distance, asked me to breathe, and helped me to calm down. With my husband still on speaker phone, I finally found the words to say, “I’m sorry.”

What followed in my mind was, “Please don’t hurt me.” In that moment of panic, I could not distinguish the kind officer in front of me from everything I had seen on the news.

My traffic citation gave the other offending cars an opportunity to drive off and, when he finally left, I began to cry. I cried for all of the Black men and women who begged for their lives and still died. I cried for Manuel Ellis, Philando Castile, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Alton Sterling, and so many more.

The list grows by the day. During …

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At a moment of career disillusionment, a new book gave me a biblical perspective on the blessings and dangers of big tech.

In the last decade, our lives have become increasingly saturated with digital technology. Apps and platforms play outsized roles socially, professionally, casually, and corporately; in work, school, and church. It can be hard to remember how we used to carry on without the technological conveniences of modern life. Even many young adults feel a chasm between the tech norms they grew up with and the world they inhabit today.

This shift seems even starker when we try to map our day-to-day digital experiences—instant news, AI chatbots, and the Metaverse—onto those we read about in the Bible. In his latest book, God, Technology, and the Christian Life, Tony Reinke outlines an incisive “theology of technology,” grounded in Scripture, which draws a clear connection between our lived experiences and those of our Old Testament heroes. In so doing, he sets a helpful foundation for a biblically-aligned worldview on modern technology.

I read this book at a timely moment, while dealing with a bout of disillusionment over my career. I’m a data scientist, a career technologist who spends his days writing algorithms that generate numbers and recommendations that populate the screens of millions of smartphones all over the world. My work involves the same techniques that large tech companies have exploited for more pernicious purposes, making them a focal point of cultural controversy.

I certainly appreciate the blessings that modern technology affords, and my tech-development day job brings real satisfaction. Yet I can’t help maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism toward ubiquitous tech use. It’s difficult to overstate the degree to which our daily habits have grown dependent on the platforms of …

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Lifeway still plans to end online music resource but apologizes for short notice.

Update (July 24): Lifeway has decided to postpone the discontinuation of lifewayworship.com, the online Baptist church music resource that was once conceived as a digital hymnal without a back cover. The Southern Baptist Convention publisher announced it was shutting the site down last week, but backtracked after an outcry from a lot of surprised worship leaders.

“We are delaying the implementation of this decision until we have time to listen, allow for dialogue, and find out how we can best support churches’ digital worship music needs,” Ben Mandrell, Lifeway CEO, said in a statement. “We are actively considering alternatives to ensure minimal disruption and keep this essential catalog alive.”

Mandrell apologized the publisher “didn’t put the turn signal on soon enough.”

When Lifeway made its initial announcement, it was unclear whether the arrangements and materials available on lifewayworship.com would be fully preserved somewhere. Lifeway Worship director Brian Brown emphasized that music ministers needed to download what they wanted before September 30, raising questions about the fate of the vast catalog of musical resources maintained on the site. Brown told CT he had hoped to migrate all the content to Lifeway’s main website so it would continue to be available, but as he prepared to make the announcement, his team realized that wouldn’t be possible in the next few months.

“Each product has to be recreated individually, and it’s tens of thousands of products,” Brown said. “It’s not something that we are going to be able to accomplish by September 30.”

Lifeway still plans to shutter the online resource, but it will remain online …

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A negative score from groups accusing PEPFAR of supporting abortion threatens the program’s five-year renewal.

The President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, or PEPFAR, has been a uniquely successful bipartisan effort, saving 25 million lives globally from HIV/AIDS since it was put into place 20 years ago. Congress and the White House have reauthorized it every five years, under different parties. It has been credited with sparing entire countries from demise.

Now it is in danger of succumbing to a political brawl.

The program must be renewed this fall. But domestic pro-life organizations, including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and The Heritage Foundation’s action arm, Heritage Action, have said a vote in favor of PEPFAR’s five-year reauthorization would be a mark against a lawmaker in their scorecards for elected leaders. The Family Research Council told CT it will also score the vote.

The groups argue that the Biden administration is trying to use the program to fund the promotion and provision of abortions. Family Research Council’s vice president for policy and government affairs Travis Weber told CT that PEPFAR was “being used as a massive slush fund for abortion and LGBT advocacy.”

Pro-lifers working to combat HIV/AIDS overseas say that is not the case and have been surprised by the domestic pro-life opposition. Funding or promoting abortion through PEPFAR would be against US law. Abortion is also illegal or highly restricted in most countries with PEPFAR-funded programs, almost all of which are in Africa.

Pro-life organizations regularly score lawmakers’ votes on particular pieces of legislation as a way of assessing commitment to pro-life causes. Deeming a vote for a given measure as negative tends to scotch Republican votes for it.

“A five-year reauthorization to us is beyond …

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A Supreme Court ruling against race-based admissions won’t change much for Christian liberal arts schools.

The US Supreme Court ruled against race-based college admissions last month, raising questions about the future of diversity efforts in higher education. But leaders at many evangelical colleges don’t expect the decision to hinder their efforts to promote diversity.

“For most Christian institutions, I don’t think there’s going to be a significant change in our recruiting practices or our admissions policies,” said James Steen, Houston Christian University’s vice president of enrollment management.

Steen, who has worked in Christian higher education admissions for 30 years, said the Supreme Court’s decision impacts institutions that are selecting students from a very large pool of applications.

“For the rest of us who aren’t the elite privates or flagship publics, we’re not turning anybody away, for the most part, who’s admissible,” he said.

Still, leaders of Christian colleges told CT they are taking this moment to clearly communicate the biblical heart behind the diversity efforts at their institutions. Pursuing a diverse student body, they say, is part of a larger mission and a critical way they seek to serve their communities.

At Houston Christian, for example, Steen said it’s important the college reflect the demographics of Houston, Texas—“an extremely diverse city.”

The college’s student demographics track pretty closely with the demographics of Houston itself. About 42 percent of undergraduate students are Hispanic, 24 percent are Black, 19 percent are white, and 9 percent are Asian.

“When you walk around our campus, your tour guide probably isn’t going to be a white student, right? You’re going to see …

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After a string of victories at the Supreme Court, focus turns to one major precedent that could be overturned.

It is an auspicious time for advocates of religious liberty in the United States. Consider what they have accomplished at the Supreme Court over the past year: They defended the right of Americans to express their faith while on the clock for a public school district (Kennedy v. Bremerton School District), affirmed the right of religious schools to use government vouchers (Carson v. Makin), heightened the standards protecting workplace accommodations for religious beliefs (Groff v. DeJoy), and expanded free speech protections for business owners who don’t want to make statements that go against their religious beliefs (303 Creative LLC v. Elenis).

What’s left to win? If you ask experts closely following the developments on the legal battlefield, they invariably give the same answer: Employment Division v. Smith.

“I predict that religious liberty advocates will ramp up their attack on Smith,” said Carl Esbeck, a professor of law at the University of Missouri. “They understand that 303 Creative was a wonderful victory, but it was a halfway victory. It only protects speech … so if they want full protection under the First Amendment free exercise clause, they need Smith reversed.”

In fact, it’s already begun. First Liberty and Alliance Defending Freedom, two religious liberty law groups, have already petitioned the Supreme Court to hear cases that call for Smith to be overruled.

To understand why Smith matters, one has to go back more than three decades. In the late 1980s, two counselors from a rehabilitation center in Oregon were fired after they ingested peyote as part of a Native American religious ceremony. The counselors applied for unemployment but were denied by the state because …

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For Amos, it depends on whether the God we worship demands justice.

In this Close Reading series, biblical scholars reflect on a passage in their area of expertise that has been formational in their own discipleship and continues to speak to them today.

My mother was Guatemalan, and she went to great lengths to make sure that our family spoke Spanish and celebrated holidays with a Guatemalan flavor. I spent most of my summers as a boy in Guatemala, spending time with family and getting to know that country that is so dear to my heart.

Years later, I found myself back in Guatemala City as a professor at a seminary. It was a time when the 36-year civil war was at its worst. The war had begun when I was a boy, but I had never processed it. I was used to seeing soldiers around and hearing stories, but the fighting was primarily in the mountains. It seemed so far away.

As an Old Testament professor, I taught students from all over Latin America who would be confronting overwhelming poverty, widespread political corruption, and armed conflict; Guatemala was not the only country experiencing civil war. What could the Old Testament offer them? Could I make the Word of God come alive in relevant ways? Clearly, God cared about these things.

Roman Catholic liberation theologians were speaking into this complicated context and offering their own analysis and theological solutions. At the time, Latin American evangelicals were just beginning to venture into discussions of society and politics. Church services largely avoided these topics, as they were thought to be too worldly, but they drove the conversation in the coffee hour. These were the realities of my everyday life.

What would an evangelical approach to these problems—one deeply grounded in Scripture and our tradition—look like? That is …

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