Posts by Thomas S. Kidd
August 07, 2024
Evangelical Christians sometimes struggle with how best to enforce “orthodoxy.” The past century of Protestant history could be written as a story of attempts to define what’s essential and what’s debatable on issues from the Bible’s “inerrancy” to more recent controversies over marriage, sexuality, and women’s ordination as pastors.
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September 06, 2023
Protestants classically believe in
sola scriptura, but they also know that some Protestants have conjured exotic beliefs based on appeals to the Bible alone. At a Baptist church where I was once a leader, the pastor and I were working to explain why a person who denied the Trinity could not be a member.
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October 25, 2022
The religion clauses in the First Amendment are among the most hotly debated topics in constitutional law and history. Unfortunately, the records of the Founders don’t always offer much help in elucidating their meaning.
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April 05, 2022
In a classic 1976 episode of
All in the Family, the TV character Archie Bunker took it upon himself to baptize his grandson at his local church. He did this secretly, as he explained to God, because his son-in-law was a “dopey atheist” who wouldn’t permit the baby to be baptized.
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February 28, 2022
I love productivity books. I’ve read all the big classics on the subject, from Stephen Covey’s
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People to Cal Newport’s
Deep Work. I am a devotee of David Allen’s productivity ur-text,
Getting Things Done.
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December 21, 2021
The latest Pew Research Center survey on American religion reflects a familiar trend in recent years: declining levels of Christian affiliation and growing numbers of religiously unaffiliated (the “nones”). Almost 30% of those surveyed told Pew that they identify with no particular religion, compared to 16% in 2007.
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