“I came to the people of Ireland to preach the Gospel, and to suffer insult from the unbelievers, bearing the reproach of my going abroad and many persecutions even unto bonds.”
The best songwriters do more than know their audience, they join them. And Kyle Hume does just that in his recent song. The first time I heard Where We Are was a month ago, thanks to an AI algorithm. As a millennial (born between 1981-1996), I follow the norm in discovering new songs on apps like Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music. But if I was Gen Z (born between 1997-2012), I would have been far more likely to hear Kyle’s music on TikTok. Kyle Hume has 156,000 subscribers on YouTube. But on TikTok, he has almost fifteen times that number...
As a teenager, I made fashion choices based on three principles: first, comfort. Second, what was most well-suited to the activities I enjoyed, such as basketball. And third, perhaps predictably, whatever would impress others. I didn’t value appearances, whether in hoodies, art museums, front lawns, or church buildings. It didn’t seem good to look good, except as a means for some other end. I thought beauty didn’t matter. I was wrong. As a young adult, I began to take my Christian faith more seriously, and at first, my views of beauty and appearance were only reinforced. Because I struggled with...
There’s a lot of talk about re-enchantment in some circles. But what is this term trying to describe? Simply put, it’s the feeling and experience that the spell of secularism is breaking and that its hold on our culture is slipping. A Story Here’s how I might tell it as a story. The world lay cold and grey under a thick fog of atheistic materialism. Everything had a natural cause, our brains were just computers, our societies akin to glorified chimpanzee families, and all religious beliefs no more than comforting group superstitions. The big questions had been answered and all...
This year, April 9 marks the end of the month-long fast sacred to Muslims around the world. Growing up in Southern California, I had little exposure to Islam in general, and to Ramadan in particular. During our ten years in Senegal, however, I learned a great deal about Ramadan thanks to my Muslim friends. And just as Paul sought to connect with his hearers as he proclaimed the message of eternal life at the Aeropagus in Acts 17, so we can seek to understand our Muslim friends, in the hopes of then being able to share our faith with them....
