Transubstantiate

Special legislative session ends without measures to prevent mass shootings at schools.

They hoped the Tennessee legislature would listen to them. They hoped the elected representatives would do something—something—to make their kids safer.

But at the end of the special session in Nashville on Tuesday, The Covenant School parents’ hopes were dashed. The legislature didn’t even vote on the bills that the families of children who survived a Nashville school shooting in March wanted to see made into law.

Wearing matching black T-shirts with the words “Get Used to Seeing These Faces,” the cofounders of Covenant Families for Better Tomorrows wept at the Capitol. And at a press conference after, some of them spoke of how hard it was going to be to explain all this to their children.

“We will go home and we’ll look at our children in the eyes,” said Mary Joyce, whose daughter was best friends with one of the girls murdered at the Presbyterian Church in America school. “They will ask what our leaders have done over the past week and a half to protect them.

The parents vowed this defeat would not be the end of their activism. Melissa Alexander, whose fourth-grade son stood silently against a wall while a shooter killed three of his classmates, addressed elected officials directly.

“The shooter confronted our children with guns,” she said. “Now you are stabbing our families and all Tennesseans in the back.”

There have been 477 mass shootings in America so far in 2023. Gun violence is the leading cause of deaths for children over the age of one, surpassing automobile accidents and cancer. Tennessee has had 17 mass shootings this year, leaving 32 people dead and 59 wounded.

One of those shootings happened in March, when a person identified as …

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New report examines the challenges of measuring religion among Chinese Protestants, Catholics, Buddhists, Muslims, and other beliefs.

Christianity’s growth in China has stalled since 2010.

That’s according to a new Pew Research Center report measuring religion in China published today. In 2010, approximately 23.2 million adults in China self-identified as Christian. In 2018, 19.9 million adults did so, which Pew researchers say is not a “statistically significant gap.”

Among Chinese Christians, the percentages of zongjiao (Mandarin for “organized religion”) activity have also stagnated. Nearly 40 percent (38%) of Christians said they engaged in such activities once a week in 2010, but that figure dipped slightly to 35 percent in 2018.

“Some scholars have relied on a mix of fieldwork studies, claims by religious organizations, journalists’ observations and government statistics to suggest that China is experiencing a surge of religion and is perhaps even on a path to having a Christian majority by 2050,” the Pew report stated.

But more than a decade’s worth of data from surveys conducted in China provide “no clear confirmation of rising levels of religious identity in China, at least not as embodied by formal zongjiao (宗教) affiliation and worship attendance.”

Pew published its previous report on religion in China in May 2008 ahead of the Beijing Olympics. While that study did not touch on the rate of growth of the Christian faith in the country, it acknowledged the presence of “indirect survey evidence” that suggested a “potentially large number of unaffiliated, independent Christians.”

Its latest report highlighted statistics from the Chinese government that appeared promising at first glance as the number of Protestants in the country jumped from 700,000 to 38 million …

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An interview with author Tara Isabella Burton on the history of self-creation—and how the habit usurps our need for God.

One of my most recent posts on Instagram is a picture of a loaf of bread I baked. I baked it because I like bread, especially fresh bread, hot out of a 450-degree oven and covered in far too much butter. But why, exactly, did I post the picture on Instagram?

It’s a nice-enough loaf, but I’ve no great baking talent. Part of my motive was simple enthusiasm for work I enjoyed. But some of it, if I’m honest, was about my image—as a writer, as a keeper of my household newly back to full-time work after maternity leave, and as the sort of person you might find interesting at a cocktail party.

There, look, I remember briefly thinking as I hit “Share,” no one can say I’m slacking on the homemaking front. I made bread!

This is ridiculous and vain and embarrassing, of course. But I come by it honestly in an era of self-creation, in which social media has given each of us the opportunity to craft a public image that is objectively artificial yet imagined as a display of authenticity.

That very dynamic is the subject of Tara Isabella Burton’s Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, published earlier this year. I reached out to Burton to ask about the theological underpinnings of her book and how the modern urge to self-create comports with Christian faith.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Let’s start with the trio of elevator questions I’m sure you’ve answered on a thousand podcasts by now: What is the book about? Why did you write it? And what readers did you have in mind?

Self-Made is an intellectual history of self-creation, the wider story of secular modernity’s idea that human beings not only can …

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The New York pastor never wanted to build a megachurch.

Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s building on West 83rd Street in Manhattan does not call attention to itself. The Crunch gym next door has a bigger, louder sign and doors plastered with offers for memberships. Redeemer’s building of glass and neutral brick blends into the buildings around it, except that if you look up, a cross shoots up above the fifth story. The church’s founding pastor, Tim Keller, was reluctant to even buy it.

“For years Tim didn’t want to be a megachurch,” said Andrea Mungo, Redeemer’s first staffer for its diaconate in the 1990s. “He wasn’t interested in purchasing a building. For years it was, ‘We want to rent so we can focus our money and energy into local ministry.’”

Keller, who died in May, was a globally known preacher, bestselling writer, leader of a 5,000-member church before before stepping down, and founder of big organizations like The Gospel Coalition in 2007. He spoke before the UK parliament and at Google’s headquarters. But for most of his adult life, he built small. His fame was derivative of his local church work.

People like Mungo—as well as Yvonne Sawyer, Justin Adour, Sobeyda Valle-Ellis, Peter Ong, and Mark Reynolds—aren’t globally recognized names but were the faces of the local church in New York and then beyond. They built an ecosystem of local institutions that are carrying on Keller’s vision of evangelicalism away from the spotlight. They planted churches and started community development organizations and counseling centers that are spreading the gospel and serving the disenfranchised.

Keller did not follow the American evangelical tradition of networking with the powerful, like …

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Our hearts aren’t prepared for the Lord until they are ready to love others.

The Book of Luke, more than any of the other Gospels, presents a sweeping look at Jesus’ teachings on ethics. Over half the parables we have from Jesus are unique to Luke. They cover topics like how to steward money and how Jesus sees people the world overlooks, such as the poor, the disabled, and women.

At the foundation of it all is Jesus and his preaching about the kingdom of God.

I have spent more than 40 years of my professional academic life in Christian vocational service and in the study of Luke’s gospel. Key texts in it have opened my eyes to the scope of Jesus’ mission in ways I rarely heard about as a younger Christian.

The first such passage is in Luke’s first chapter. Gabriel foretells the birth and calling of John the Baptist to his father, Zechariah, saying John will prepare the way for the Messiah.

He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. And he will go as forerunner before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers back to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared for him. (vv. 16–17, NET throughout)

One of the things I have learned about reading Scripture is to define its terms by asking questions of the text. Here the question arises, “What does it mean to be a people prepared for the coming of the Lord?” This text gives a two-part answer.

First, the expected part: John will turn people back to God. This reflects quite rightly what prophets are supposed to do.

The second component—which is also part of John’s call and what God seeks from people ready for deliverance—is what had eluded me in the past. Gabriel announces that John …

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Reclaiming the culture wars requires reclaiming wonder.

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Last week I was talking with a new believer in Christ—one who came from a thoroughly secular background—and she mentioned that some family members were really worried about her. “I can’t believe you’ve become an evangelical Christian,” one of them said. “How can you be for guns?”

Guns?

The family member assumed that her becoming an evangelical Christian meant she had joined a political tribe, complete with gun-culture views of assault weapons. But this new Christian happened to have the same political view on this issue as her family. Of all the things that changed in her conversion, her view on guns wasn’t one of them.

My shoulders slumped when I heard this—and it wasn’t because I agreed or didn’t agree with this family’s views on gun policy. My disappointment was because I had heard some version of this many times before—people who, when hearing about evangelical Christianity, think not of the gospel but of some extreme political identity.

It would be easy to blame that on the media portrayal of evangelical Christians in America (“All they pay attention to is the politics!”) or on this woman’s family members (“How religiously illiterate has America become that all these people see are caricatures?”).

There are ways that the outside world does unthinkingly caricature evangelical Christianity. That’s hardly a new development with secularization—note the many jokes about George Whitefield’s preaching in early American newspapers or the writings of H. L. Mencken, who didn’t mean “Bible Belt” as a compliment. …

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But it doesn’t mean what you think it means.

At the first Republican presidential primary debate of the 2024 election, the last biblical reference of the night was also its most significant—and the most often misunderstood.

“In his pitch to get to the Oval Office, President Reagan called America the ‘shining city on a hill,’ a beacon of hope and optimism,” prompted moderator Bret Baier.

“So, in your closing statement tonight, please tell American voters why you are the person who can inspire this nation to a better day,” said Baier’s fellow Fox News host, Martha MacCallum.

Former vice president Mike Pence’s response stuck closest to the theme, evoking the same 1630 speech Reagan quoted, with a reference to Americans’ Puritan forebears. “God is not done with America yet,” Pence said, “and if we will renew our faith in him who has ever guided this nation since we arrived on these wilderness shores, I know the best days for the greatest nation on earth are yet to come.”

City on a hill—this captivating little phrase has a complicated American history, one that often ignores the phrase’s true origin: not among the Puritans, but in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.

The phrase was used by the governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, John Winthrop, in his 1630 treatise “A Model of Christian Charity”: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” Historians are not certain when (or if) Winthrop delivered the speech, but the popular story is that he gave it on the flagship Arbella to his fellow Puritan travelers on their way to Salem, Massachusetts.

Winthrop’s words have been …

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These Tennesseans are finding ways to live without adding to the landfill. But they aren’t finding a lot of “zero waste” company.

Zach and Sadie McElrath’s six-year-old daughter saw something at a store that caught her eye: a slingshot. But they didn’t buy it for her because it would have ultimately produced landfill waste. Instead, their daughter is figuring out how to make a slingshot with a stick and rubber bands from around the house.

The McElraths, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, live a “zero waste” life. What they do throw away is compostable, except for the rare cases when they end up with items that have to go to the landfill, such as an Amazon envelope or a bag from frozen berries. They take their trash to the curb once or twice a year, even as a family of five with children ages 9, 6, and 2.

Both parents work—Sadie as a nurse practitioner, and Zach as a software engineer at a start-up. Even with their full life, they find the zero-waste life doable and even freeing, not having to think about buying things like slingshots.

“Other people might not be as extreme as we are,” said Sadie. “But everybody can do something.”

The McElraths have been living this way since 2017, and they haven’t found many other Christians interested in zero waste over the years. They find more zero-waste efforts coming from faith groups like the Unitarian Universalists. But they have been seeing more interest among Christians in their circles in doing things like composting.

This tracks with national data on evangelical attitudes about the environment compared to other faith groups. Evangelicals are the religious group least likely to see climate change as a serious problem, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey. And a University of Florida study found a generational divide among evangelicals over that …

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The particularities of people groups can aid the work of understanding and proclaiming the gospel.

The worldwide growth of Christianity has brought about a flowering of theological perspectives. Yet many Western theologians have little familiarity with theologians working in non-Western contexts. Stephen T. Pardue, a professor at the Asia Graduate School of Theology, addresses this problem in a new book, Why Evangelical Theology Needs the Global Church. J. Nelson Jennings, editor of the journal Global Missiology, spoke with Pardue about the blessings of engaging with majority-world theologians.

You grew up in the United States, but you’ve spent many years living and teaching in the Philippines. How has that background shaped your thinking on theology and the global church?

Like most culturally hybrid people, I couldn’t possibly trace all the intricacies of how I’ve been shaped. One of my joys in writing the book was getting to reflect on these complex realities, which often get either ignored or oversimplified in theological books. In my own book, I try to move beyond these simplifications—for example, speaking of “Eastern” and “Western” theologies as if all theologians within these categories think the same way. I hope readers will feel invited to consider how the cultural plurality of God’s people helps us hear the Good News more fully.

Why, to invoke your book title, does evangelical theology need the global church?

We need the input of the whole church to thrive. This means not just celebrating the church’s growing diversity for vague reasons of politeness or political correctness, but developing a coherent framework for how culture can inform our theology without undermining its primary focus: the triune God revealed in Scripture.

One of my big themes is that …

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As the toll of overdoses continue to rise, congregations provide recovery, medical care, and redemption.

It was the prayer requests that caught the new minister’s attention. Not long after Lisa Bryant arrived at the Madam Russell United Methodist Church, a historic congregation named for one of the original pioneers in Saltville, Virginia, she began to notice the repetition. The same underlying problem kept rearing up in the needs she heard.

“I got phone calls from some members: ‘Please pray for my grandson, he’s on drugs again,’” she said. “Or someone’s niece would get arrested again.”

Drugs—methamphetamines, oxycontin, heroin, fentanyl—were hiding everywhere in the prayers of the people.

The town of just 2,000 people in southwestern Virginia had almost nothing to help those struggling with addiction. The nearest recovery group was an hour’s drive away. Residential rehab facilities were even farther—out of reach of anyone without a decent income and reliable transportation, which is a lot of people in that part of the country. So Bryant believed that the church, in the Wesleyan spirit of doing all the good you can for all the people you can, could start a recovery group.

It shouldn’t be too hard, she thought. Churches have been hosting 12-step meetings across the country for decades.

She brought the idea to the church council: They should launch a program to help people in Saltville deal with the opioids crisis ravaging the region.

“Everybody was quiet,” Bryant told CT, recalling the moment from five years ago. “Then one guy spoke up and said, ‘We don’t really have that problem here. That doesn’t pertain to us.’”

“Really?” she asked, stunned to tears. “It’s all around us. You …

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