Christianity in a Secular World

I don’t know anything about France, but this article seems like it accurately describes our cultural moment:

”In Café Flores where Sartre and Camus discussed the absurdity of life, people scan their phones safely cocooned from such disturbing ideas. Trains, lifts, even waiting at traffic lights are all opportunities to rehearse our secular liturgy: look down, pull out, flip open, here and now, here and now.”

And what we at CTK hope to be:

"Christians carrying within them the reign of heaven will need to let their weirdness shine; their time-consuming religious habits, their inconvenient commitment and love of others, their solidly unspectacular contentedness, and their embrace of weakness that allows the power and grace of their servant Lord to glow. The front line of secularism is here, but the resistance has begun."

Social Media and the Neighborhood

How did it happen that the thing which was supposed to bind us together is the thing that drove us apart? What if (digitally) leaving the neighborhood to associate with like-minded people actually increases our loneliness, instead of ameliorating it?

There is a better option: stay in place, and associate with people different than you. Bari Weiss and Eve Peyser are trying it out- getting together, not to fight about things they disagree with, but to live in the physical world, and eat physical bread. As critics have pointed out, this sort of relationship is hard, its costly, and there is only one thing that can sustain it: the meal with the God who left the place of power, comfort and authority, and moved into our neighborhood (John 1).

What sort of guest are you?

The holidays are upon us, which means food, travel, and family. Some of us are hosts, and some of us are guests. And there is nothing worse than a terrible houseguest: they smoke in your rooms, they threaten to spank your children, and they never leave.

The book of 1 Peter is written to encourage Christians to be a different sort of guest. To be the sort of people who are self-controlled, and seek the good of their hosts- even when the hosts are malicious gossips. The motivation for being this type of guest? That one day we are going home. Or to be more precise, home is coming to us. Sort of like this: