Ever wish you had a quick and thoughtful reply ready when you get a hard question about faith? Rick Mattson explores some ways to be prepared. Read more…
Elevator Apologetics, Part 4: Proof and Packages
Does God have to prove himself? Read more…
Elevator Apologetics Part 3: Do you need faith to do good?
One evening after doing an outreach event at a large campus in the Midwest, I was packing up my gear and a student approached me and said, “I can do good in society without God’s help. I don’t need God in order to be a good person and serve others.”Read more…
Elevator Apologetics, Part 2: Religion equals ignorance?
Let’s consider a common skeptic’s objection: “Religion is nothing more than superstition and ignorance.”Read more…
Elevator Apologetics, Part 1
Sometimes in apologetic dialogue (making a case for Christian faith) we don’t have the luxury of extended conversation where we can explain our points thoroughly.Read more…
Open-Handed Communication: The Rhetoric of Christian Persuasion
In Os Guiness’s recent apologetics book Fool’s Talk, what role does rhetoric play? Literary scholar David Parry draws on his knowledge of classical and Christian rhetorical traditions to unpack one strand of Guinness’s ideas about apologetics. Read more…
Book Review: The Romantic Rationalist: God, Life and Imagination in the Work of C.S. Lewis
The book should be called, “Why we think it is ok for evangelicals to like Lewis.”Read more…
Book Review: Fool’s Talk, by Os Guinness
Summary: Guinness argues for the recovery of the lost art of persuasion that combines good apologetic work with evangelism and is aware of the many people Christians address who are not open to their message.Read more…
Book Review: God is Great, God is Good
This collection of essays provides thoughtfully reasoned responses to the leading challenges to Christianity posed by the New Atheism.Read more…
Loving our Atheist Neighbors with Truth and Love: Rick Mattson at Urbana
How should Christians approach conversations about faith with atheists? At the Urbana Student Missions Conference, Rick Mattson examined common atheist arguments and argued for a holistic Christian response that includes intellect, care-giving, and friendship.Read more…
Book Review: Questioning Your Doubts
Summary: This book comes out of the world of academic research and proposes that the process of questioning our doubts as well as our faith builds bridges of understanding deepening both our exercise of reason and confidence in our faith.Read more…
Loving Your Atheist Neighbor, Part 4 (Urbana Preview)
Everything we say about the faith is potentially dismissible. At first this may seem a liability, but I think just the opposite. Read more…
Love Your Atheist Neighbor, Part 3 (Urbana Preview)
The next question that needs to be addressed, then, is How does one find God? This moves us into positive case-making for Christian faith.Read more…
Loving Your Atheist Neighbor, Part 2 (Urbana preview)
“Science is rational and based on reason. Faith is just the opposite. It’s basically irrational. So unless God proves himself to me scientifically, I’ll never believe in him.” How would you respond?Read more…
Loving Your Atheist Neighbor, Part 1 (Urbana preview)
At the upcoming Urbana Mission Convention, I will be presenting a seminar called “Love Your Atheist Neighbor.” But who is my atheist neighbor? you ask.Read more…
Surely the Lord Was in the Rare Books Room, Part 2 (Scholar’s Compass)
Christians in university settings can all too often find in the church and in academe two cultures that lead us to discouragement. The most uptight Pharisees can miss Christ just as easily as the most ardent skeptics by failing to see the God that they have misdefined in the first place. Read more…
Book Review: True Paradox
Summary: David Skeel argues that far from being a problem for Christians, the complexity of the world is in fact something best explained by the Christian faith. This book is helpful both for the person considering whether it makes senseRead more…
Book Review: Apologetics Beyond Reason
Apologetics Beyond Reason, by James W. Sire. This book maps a different apologetic approach from most rational apologetics, arguing for “signals of transcendence” throughout creation and in literature that point us to God, if we will see this.Read more…
Science Corner: Says Who?
In reviewing the science news sites, it was hard to get away from Eric Metaxas’s Wall Street Journal op-ed on fine-tuning and what it says about the likelihood of God, and from the host of responses to it. I don’t have anythingRead more…
Cur Deus Homo. An Advent Devotional
In the incarnation, God is doing something which mankind could not do for himself – surrender, suffer and die in a perfect way. Read more…
Re-Examining Lewis’ Trilemma
How do you understand and invite others to interact with an argument which has become “classic” Lewis?Read more…
Nature as a Christian Apologetic: Intelligent Design Revisited
Introduction This is the second of a two-part series addressing the question of whether nature can be used as a Christian apologetic. Natural theology is a discipline that systematically explores the proposed link between God and nature. The traditional approachRead more…
Getting started with “How Faith Is Like Skydiving” (Excerpt)
Many books on apologetics do well with the arguments, but have little on how to present them. Faith Is Like Skydiving combines reason with rhetoric, clarity with intellectual depth. It provides a vast array of arguments and a host of imagesRead more…
Nature as a Christian Apologetic: The Open Secret
Introduction In previous blogs, we’ve seen that God reveals himself to man through nature and through scripture and we’ve been addressing questions about how man’s interpretations of these revelations can be reconciled. In the next two blogs we are goingRead more…