I recently
received an email from my good friend, Ellis Potter, and wanted to pass it on
to you. My review of Ellis’ fine book, 3
Theories of Everything, is available on Ransom’s website here. If you haven’t
read it, please do so or order the audio version if you prefer.
Dear Friends:
3 Theories of Everything (3TOE) is now
available as an audio book.
It is
beautifully narrated by Ed Burrowes, who has a great voice and wonderful sense
of drama and narration. Enjoy.
Help make
this news go viral. You know how.
The audio
book is available from:
CD
baby here.
In Christ,
Ellis
Ross Douthat, Op-ed columnist for the New York Times, takes another look at the brouhaha that resulted
when a journalist suggested Tiger Woods should consider Christianity since
being revealed as an unfaithful husband. Brit Hume, on Fox News many people noted with displeasure, had made the gaffe,
showing both the moral bankruptcy of Fox as a news source and the danger of
religious people being allowed to proselytize in the public square.
Douthat asks us to ignore the hissing in the background and
be more thoughtful about what took place:
Liberal democracy
offers religious believers a bargain. Accept, as a price of citizenship, that
you may never impose your convictions on your neighbor, or use state power to
compel belief. In return, you will be free to practice your own faith as you
see fit — and free, as well, to compete with other believers (and nonbelievers)
in the marketplace of ideas.
That’s the theory. In
practice, the admirable principle that nobody should be persecuted for their
beliefs often blurs into the more illiberal idea that nobody should ever
publicly criticize another religion. Or champion one’s own faith as an
alternative. Or say anything whatsoever about religion, outside the privacy of
church, synagogue or home.
A week ago, Brit Hume
broke all three rules at once. Asked on a Fox News panel what advice he’d give
to the embattled Tiger Woods, Hume suggested that the golfer consider
converting to Christianity. “He’s said to be a Buddhist,” Hume noted. “I don’t
think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered
by the Christian faith. ”
A great many people
immediately declared that this comment was the most outrageous thing they’d
ever heard.
Douthat suggest that the outcry misses what might in fact be
the most essential issue. “Theology has consequences,” he argues. “It shapes
lives, families, nations, cultures, wars; it can change people, save them from
themselves, and sometimes warp or even destroy them. If we tiptoe politely
around this reality, then we betray every teacher, guru and philosopher—including
Jesus of Nazareth and the Buddha both—who ever sought to resolve the most human
of all problems: How then should we live?”
You can read Douthat’s interesting piece, “Let’s Talk About
Faith,” here. I recommend it to you.
Ross Douthat, an Op-ed columnist for the New York Times and film reviewer for National Review, saw Avatar, James Cameron’s latest movie epic and sees in it more of interest than the latest cinematic technical advances.
It’s fitting that James Cameron’s “Avatar” arrived in theaters at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It’s at once the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.
But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.
You can read Douthat’s thoughtful piece, “Heaven and Nature,” here.
When I was in college, way back in the fabled Sixties, the demise of religion was not argued but assumed. The progress of science, technology, and education, we were told repeatedly, made secularism inevitable. Increasingly superstition would be replaced by reason, and religious belief would fade away before the onslaught of to an enlightened modernism.
Needless to say, it hasn’t turned out that way. Not even close, in fact.
Lamin Sanneh, the D. Willis James Professor of Missions & World Christianity at Yale, draws together some of the latest statistics in an essay, “The Return of Religion” (which you can read here):
The total world population in 1900 was 1.6 billion; Muslims numbered just below 200 million, and Christians 558 million. In 1970, the total world population was 3.7 billion with a Muslim population of 549 million and Christians at 1.2 billion. In 2006, Muslims numbered 1.3 billion and Christians 2.15 billion, including 1.3 billion Catholics. In less than forty years, the number of Christians in the world had nearly doubled, and Muslims had more than doubled…
Religious expansion in Africa entered its most vigorous phase following the end of colonial and missionary hegemony. In 1900, the Muslim population of Africa was 34.5 million, compared to roughly 8.7 million Christians, a ratio of 4:1. By 1985, Christians outnumbered Muslims in Africa. Of the continent’s total population of 520 million, Christians numbered 270.5 million, compared to about 216 million Muslims. By 2000, Christians in Africa had grown to 346 million, and Africa’s 315 million Muslims were concentrated mostly in the Arabic speaking regions of Egypt and in north and west Africa. Projections for 2025 are for 600 million Christians and 519 million Muslims in Africa. The Christian figures represent a continental shift of historic proportions.
Europe (including Russia) and North America in 1900 had a combined Christian population of 423 million—82 percent of the world’s Christians—compared to 94 million for the rest of the world. By 2005, Europe and North America accounted for only 35 percent of the world’s Christians; their 758 million Christians were far fewer than the 1.4 billion in the rest of the world. Thus, 65 percent of the world’s Christians now live in the southern hemisphere and in East Asia, areas that have become Christianity’s new stronghold. Increasingly, Europe is a new Christian margin.
Charismatic Christianity has been the driving engine of this expansion and is largely responsible for the dramatic shift in the religion’s center of gravity. In 1900 there were 981,000 Pentecostals; in 1970, over seventy two million; and in 2005, nearly 590 million. The projections are that by 2025, Pentecostals/Charismatics will number nearly eight hundred million. Now exploding in Brazil, Mexico, Russia, and China, Pentecostal Christianity may become the most widespread form of Christianity, with as yet unquantifiable effects on mainline churches and on global politics.
Obviously statistics tell only a small part of the story, but the part they tell is important. Religious belief, not secularism is the primary story of the 21st century. The center of world Christianity is no longer in America and Europe, but in the majority world.
Christians in America have never been hesitant to tell Third World Christians what to believe, why, and how to order their churches and lives. I wonder how eager we will be to listen to the majority world church, which is grateful for the western missionary movement but isn’t always impressed with how we live out our faith.
[Lamin Sanneh’s essay appeared in The Cresset: A review of literature, the arts, and public affairs, a publication of Valparaiso University (June 2009) p 15-23].