So I know you’ll forgive me if I don’t get too excited about the reported drop in the unemployment rate. Before you get carried away by the hype, keep asking yourself, “Am I better off now than I was four years ago?”

Sex, Dating, and Relationships: A Fresh Approach

By Gerald Hiestand and Jay Thomas

Considering the pervasive immorality and high divorce rate of our contemporary Christian culture, we evidently need a biblically based, theologically compelling, practical understanding of sex, dating, and relationships. Pastors Gerald Hiestand and Jay Thomas counteract this problem with their paradigm-shifting view of purity and relationships—a view that challenges even the basic assumptions of evangelical subculture.

Unlike most books on dating, this one cuts straight to the heart of dating relationships, asserting with confidence that the line must be drawn at “no sexual activity” whatever. Few have dared to define and apply the Bible’s understanding of purity in premarital relationships to this degree, but Heistand and Thomas have done it. Furthermore, both authors are vocational pastors who communicate regularly with the target audience and have a proven ability to express biblical truth in a winsome and compelling manner. Sex, Dating, and Relationships adds a new, almost provocative voice to the conversation that, with straightforward theological insight, pleads with Christians to get serious about honoring Christ with their sexuality.

While sometimes it seems as if there is nothing left for Christians to say about sex, I’m looking forward to this book. When Jay Thomas was the college pastor at College Church, I found his teaching to be biblical and powerful. Jay is wise beyond his years.

Small comforts (and other sizes) emerge from Planned Parenthood’s bullying tactics.

Nicely said! Other organizations will now think twice before supporting Planned Parenthood, whose veneer of respectability has been torn away.

People with disabilities are central to the mission of the church.

Secular stereotypes about religion die hard. On February 1, 1993, Washington Post reporter Michael Weisskopf wrote that politically conservative Christians are “poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” Reinforcing the stereotype, during the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama said that working-class voters “cling to guns or religion.”

Apparently Rob Bell’s best-selling Love Wins and its ambivalent stance towards an “eternal” hell (as “eternal” has historically been interpreted by evangelicals at least) continue to send ripples. Two authors, author of Crazy Love Francis Chan and senior managing editor of Christianity Today Mark Galli have now responded with their own books, both of which seem at the outset (from a reading of Stan Guthrie’s review in Books and Culture) like a sniffing out of any potentially dangerous “universalism” (the idea that all people at some point in the scheme of eternity will be saved) in both Bell’s book and the Bible.

See the review here.