Leadingchurch.com

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/andrew-sullivan-hope-arrives-in-virginia.html

https://www.thedailybeast.com/can-a-kevin-spacey-or-harvey-weinstein-really-be-treated-for-sex-addiction

https://musingsonscience.wordpress.com/2017/11/09/return-to-adam/

Loren Haarsma begins by laying a foundation with three key doctrines to which the people associated with BioLogos are committed (p. 50).

• Humans are created “in the image of God,” with a special relationship to God and a role to play in God’s creation.

• All humans who have ever lived have sinned by rebelling against God’s revealed will.

• God has dealt with sin through Christ’s incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, and promised return.

Loren sketches four general positions on the question of Adam and Eve that are faithful to Christian doctrines and to our understanding of biology, genetics, and evolution (pp. 53-55).

1. Adam and Eve as a transformed pair of ancient representative-ancestors of all humanity. … God specially selected a pair not only to receive special revelation but also to be miraculously transformed … to make it possible for them to be truly holy, capable of obeying all of God’s spiritual and moral requirements. While they were for a while able not to sin, nevertheless they sinned, and the special grace that allowed them to be sinless was withdrawn. … The spiritual, psychological, and cultural effects of sin eventually spread to the entire population.

2. Adam and Eve as a small group of ancient representative-ancestors of all humanity. … God specially selected a small family group of a few dozen individuals to receive special revelation. Although they could have lived according to God’s expectations for them, they chose to sin. These people are among the ancestors of all humans.

3. Adam and Eve as a pair of recent representatives of all humanity. God specially selected a pair of individuals to receive revelation and to act as representatives (but not ancestors) of all human beings. They disobeyed God and fell into sin in a concentrated historical event. Because they sinned as representatives of all humanity, all of humanity fell into sin.

4. Adam and Eve as literary figures in a highly compressed history of all our ancestors. … God used both general and special revelation to tell them how they ought to behave and the consequences of disobedience. They chose disobedience again and again.

https://4thwavenow.com/2017/11/07/a-teen-desister-tells-her-story/

Back to the same point Lewis and Plantinga and many others have made regarding materialism.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-illusionist

That, as it happens, may be the chief question Dennett neglects to ask: Why presume that the scientific image is true while the manifest image is an illusion when, after all, the scientific image is a supposition of reason dependent upon decisions regarding methods of inquiry, whereas the manifest image — the world as it exists in the conscious mind — presents itself directly to us as an indubitable, inescapable, and eminently coherent reality in every single moment of our lives? How could one possibly determine here what should qualify as reality as such? Dennett certainly provides small reason why anyone else should adopt the prejudices he cherishes. The point of From Bacteria to Bach and Back is to show that minds are only emergent properties of our brains, and brains only aggregates of mindless elements and forces. But it shows nothing of the sort.

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-most-important-word-in-christianity.html

https://bostonreview.net/race-politics/elizabeth-catte-mythical-whiteness-trump-country

The idea that confronting racism risks irrevocably alienating individuals of all races is both a common and predictable strain of thought among conservatives, but it becomes more sinister when it is propped up by the belief that the white individuals in question represent a disadvantaged race unto themselves.

A neutral observer might say to simply ignore the Hillbilly Elegy phenomenon as best we can. But that isn’t possible. Vance is in our schools, our libraries. He is at our graduations and in our newspaper. He’s like the monster from It Follows.