Postmodern Realities Podcast

Contrary to popular thinking, Christianity is a “knowledge tradition” and calls people to knowledge of God, themselves, and the gospel. This also means, paradoxically, that we ought to know what it is that we cannot possibly know and how we should orient ourselves to our not-knowing under God. This Postmodern Realities episode is a conversation with Journal author Douglas Groothuis about his artic...

New Age spiritual leader, New York Times bestselling author, and ancient alien expert on the History channel, David Wilcock subscribes to many conspiracies, from time travel to benevolent extraterrestrials on earth. Wilcock also believes he’s the reincarnation of Edgar Cayce and that he’s serving humankind by preparing us for a mass evolutionary event. How should Christians respond to his teaching...

Wonder Woman 1984 is a film about longing. A major temptation when adapting comic book material is to sacrifice characters and emotionally resonant narratives for action sequences driven primarily by special effects and computer-generated images. While WW84 is not short on action, and the special effects are top-notch, the movie does not turn upon these sequences. Instead, the narrative is carried...

Woven through the political struggles of Star Wars are religious and personal conflicts. It’s possible that Star Wars is the most religiously interested of all major Hollywood franchises. While religion is almost completely absent in mainstream Hollywood cinema–except as an occasional bogeyman or mythological background–Star Wars is centered on the abstract and impersonal “Force” as a source of su...

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus asked. “No one is good except God alone. Social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion works through the secular psychological research that propels each person towards the defense of personal goodness. In a series of interviews with people from differently stratified class, gende...

Generation Z,” or Gen Z, the generation born after 1995 has grown up as digital natives. What can we do to reach this younger generation, which is more likely to be spiritually and biblically illiterate than any previous, and to shepherd the faith of Gen Z within the church? While it is tempting to use generational research to develop highly contextual approaches to evangelism that meet young peop...

Christopher Pike is the original captain of the famed starship Enterprise, played first by Jeffrey Hunter in an unaired 1965 pilot (“The Cage”) and now by Anson Mount in the forthcoming CBS All Access series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Mount’s portrayal first won over audiences and critics alike in the second season of Star Trek: Discovery (2017), which reimagined Pike as a grounded and unflapp...

The recent Netflix documentary, “The Social Dilemma,” brings together a handful of past Silicon Valley executives to begin to question and consider how our social media practices — and even the algorithms and business models — actually detract from human freedom, connection, health, and social stability. The question for Christians is not only how has social media changed the landscape of civility...

Matthew Kennedy writes in his article, “It is difficult to find a professing Christian leader who has relinquished the classical Christian position on sexuality on purely exegetical grounds. The most popular voices in the less academic evangelical realm who claim to have changed their minds–Matthew Vines, Justin Lee, and Jen Hatmaker–are either gay or are very close to someone who is. The readines...

The burnout rates of medical professionals in 2020 have turned our attention to the fact that those who care for others must also care for themselves physically, mentally, and emotionally if they wish to continue being effective. Although it is agreed that self-care is important, our cultural understanding of how we view and care for “self” has changed over time. Contemporary American culture assu...

Today, almost twenty-five percent of American adults self-identify as religiously unaffiliated, roughly the same numbers of Evangelicals and Catholics, respectively, making them one of the fastest-growing demographics, especially amongst the young. If asked why, bestselling author and Atheist Sam Harris might respond, “Because science!” However, there is always a story behind the statistics, a nar...

During the Spring of 2020, right as the global pandemic hit, author, speaker, and women’s lifestyle guru Rachel Hollis launched a 90-day challenge to become an overall better and more functional person. Through March, April, and May, Hollis posted peppy, adorable photos of her and her husband Dave, chatted about writing a book in the middle of the chaos of COVID, and pivoted her brand at lightning...

The word evangelism can cause many images to form in the Christian mind. Some people may think of committed missionaries who travel to the ends of the earth. Others may think of Paul, Peter, Stephen, and other martyrs of the early church who lost their lives for the sake of the gospel. Still, others might imagine a man in a suit on a street corner with a bullhorn and a gospel tract. Probably few o...

The six-season animated Netflix show BoJack Horseman has been nominated for three Emmy awards, including twice for Outstanding Animated Program. The show is largely about the titular antihero, BoJack Horseman (voiced by Will Arnett) who is an anthropomorphic horse and has-been television sitcom star from the 1980s and ‘90s who now lives a directionless life, wallowing in biting sarcasm and ongoing...

Suburban life–including tract homes, strip malls, commuter culture–shapes our desires. More than half of Americans live in the suburbs. But for many Christians, however: “The suburbs are ignored (‘Your place doesn’t matter, we’re all going to heaven anyway’), denigrated and demeaned (‘You’re selfish if you live in a suburb; you only care about your own safety and advancement’), or seen as a cop-ou...

Film director Christopher Nolan’s unwritten thoughts are like sculptures and aim less at recreating life as much as creating Escher-like puzzle boxes that are utterly unlike almost anything we experience in reality. Nolan is the consummate trickster, aiming to use the full power of cinema to beguile audiences with the cleverness of his construction projects. His newest film Tenet, now in some thea...

The Enneagram, a personality system configured around a circle of nine types, promises to help the spiritual seeker break free from sin, peel back layers of dysfunctional ways of thinking, and find inside him or herself the essential, God-given gem. The nine numbers are grouped by three—those of the head, those of the heart, and those of the gut. Each number is associated with a particular sin and...

While thoughtful Christians should have many places where they disagree with the Black Lives Matter organization; the simple statement “black lives matter” should be non-controversial for Christians for it is theologically certain. God’s Word tells us that “black lives matter” when it reveals to us that all human beings are made in the image/likeness of God (see Gen 1:26-27, 9:6, Jas 3:9). While i...

Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker writes that “the idea of death, the fear of it haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity — activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man” Becker also says, “All culture, all man’s creative life-ways are in some basic part of them a fab...

“Why,” Camus asks, “should a human go on living if life has no meaning?” He concludes that life can be lived—even loved—despite the emptiness from which it arises and to which it returns. Such meaninglessness as Camus describes arises from his lack of religious faith. What he does accept are those things of which he feels sure: “This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This wor...

Maturity in human beings is a kind of flourishing, becoming what you were made to be: socially, spiritually, and intellectually. The late theologian J. I. Packer wrote in his book A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life, “Maturity is a compound of wisdom, goodwill, resilience, and creativity.” What does that mean for Christian college students in 2020 as they face online st...

What is the meaning of the term pro-life? How should Christians define this term? This is a point/counterpoint discussion. Michael W. Austin defends his viewpoint from his article “The Meaning of the Term Pro-Life. A Point/Counterpoint Conversation: Pro-Life for All Human Life” (available by clicking here https://www.equip.org/article/the-meaning-of-the-term-pro-life-a-point-counterpoint-conversat...

It is almost impossible to spend any time on social media, to read any legacy media source, or opinion piece, or have a conversation with someone in real life and not come around to the question of cancelling. To be successfully cancelled, then, is to lose not only the right to participate in public discourse using social media, but to lose income, reputation, and in some cases real life friendshi...

To give a Christian apologetic response to school shootings, it is important to address the problem of evil. How is it possible that a perfectly good God who is in control over all things would allow such heinous acts of violence carried out against innocent children? Of first importance is the philosophical answer to this question. However, ministering to those affected by gun violence, we are al...

In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas revitalized Christian theology by applying principles of Greek philosophy to the explanation and defense of the Christian faith. Thomism, or the philosophical application of Aquinas’s thought, has a privileged place in the Roman Catholic Church and has been embraced by a growing number of Evangelical and Protestant Thomists. Among non-Christians, Aquinas i...