John Murdock

After you exit the interstate and turn on a two lane strip of asphalt headed towards Wendell Berry’s old Kentucky home, one of the first signs you see proclaims—with the leading word emblazoned in red letters: “Caution, Church Entrance Ahead.” It is a warning that Mr. Berry, the celebrated . . . . Continue Reading »

Happy Earth Day! Easter it is not, but this niche “holiday” does afford an opportunity to reflect on the spiritual influences behind the modern environmental movement. Its three most important figures—John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson—were all deeply influenced by the Book of Nature and the Book of Books, but none fully embraced the King of Kings.Muir was the product of a strict Campbellite home where he learned most of the Bible “by heart and by sore flesh.” Its imprint never left him, but Muir’s spiritual vision was incomplete—he was carried to ecstasy by the work of creation not the Resurrection. Yet, what he saw he saw in a holy fullness that most of us now miss, and his lyrical prose is filled with biblical echoes. “Heaven knows,” Muir would write, “that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains.” Continue Reading »

Texas is a big place, and as Robert Wuthnow has recently reminded us in Rough Country: How Texas Became America’s Most Powerful Bible-Belt State, it has an oversized role in matters of religion and politics. That is one reason why the recent Texas Monthly cover story falling head over heels for gay marriage struck me as significant. Now, a month later, the reviews are in. The April “Roar of the Crowd” letters section describes a “voluminous inrush of response” often including the magazine itself, returned in protest. The staff seems likely, however, to take the rebuke as a badge of honor. Continue Reading »

As I was rallying for life with several thousand other Texans at our state capitol, a few dozen pro-choicers insisted on parading through with “Abortion on Demand and Without Apology” banners while screaming “Keep Your Rosaries, Off our Ovaries!” That’s pretty standard irreligious stuff, but at the West Cost March for Life, marchers were subjected to a chant with a different wrinkle: “Save the Earth, Don’t Give Birth!” It’s a particularly unfortunate slogan, for it risks obscuring the connections between welcoming the unborn and caring for creation—connections long noted by heroes of the pro-life movement and well worth remembering today. Continue Reading »

These days, when outsiders consider Methodism, they tend to quickly assume that it is just withering away on its deathbed. But before checking for a pulse, observers ought to call to mind its history, particularly its vigorous beginnings. John Wesley preached to thousands from his father’s grave after being muzzled by the Anglican Church, and when the movement he spearheaded crossed the Atlantic, American Methodism spread on horseback as its dedicated circuit-riders expanded their territory along with the young nation. According to Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, in 1776, Methodists made up only a sliver of the religious pie, just some 2.5 percent of worshipers. By 1850, however, Methodism was by far the largest expression of Christianity in the United States, claiming over a third of all the nation’s religious adherents. Continue Reading »

This Thursday, for the first time since he argued before the Supreme Court in 2013 for a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, Theodore Olson will be back in the Federalist Society limelight. The former Solicitor General of the United States under President George W. Bush—for whom he successfully argued Bush v. Gore—will be talking not gay marriage but class actions and the BP oil spill settlement. A few years ago, that would have amounted to business as usual. Olson, a gifted communicator, would regularly serve as a Federalist Society speaker, even acting as their reviewer in chief after the Supreme Court wrapped up its session each June. However, when he rather publicly began calling for the court creation of “equal protection” rights utterly unfathomable to our nation’s founders, those duties generally ceased. Continue Reading »

I was probably the only person who thought of theologian Wayne Grudem while watching Noah, Darren Aronofsky’s controversial epic now flooding DVD players. (Spoiler alert.) Grudem involuntarily came to mind when Tubal-Cain, the villainous ark stowaway, jarringly bites into a sleeping reptile. A dumbfounded Ham says, “The beasts are precious. There are only two of each!” Tubal-Cain, chewing away, confidently replies, “And there is only one of me.” The much better looking Grudem, a professor at Phoenix Seminary and past president of the Evangelical Theological Society, had similarly jarred me two years before when, speaking at a fundraising dinner ostensibly focused on the stewardship of creation, he smilingly advocated the extinction of a species to satisfy human appetites. Continue Reading »

Will traditional marriage follow the path of preborn life—an issue moving from judicial activism and socially elite proclamations that a generational shift was “inevitable” and “the debate is over” to our day decades later where the youngsters are more right minded about abortion than their parents. That seemed to be the hope of many taking to the podium at the March for Marriage, held June 19th in Washington approximately a year after the Supreme Court struck down much of the Defense of Marriage Act that President Bill Clinton had signed into law. Continue Reading »

A new federal tome has put climate change in the news cycle for a too-brief moment—extended a bit thanks to the cultural power of Pat Sajak and the pope. Like a doctor at an annual physical saying, “You’re even fatter than last year, and it’s not good for you,” the National Climate Assessment (NCA) tells us once again that temperatures, sea levels, ocean acidities, and greenhouse gas levels are on the way up. Continue Reading »

Noah Toly opens his reply to my recent Q conference review by stating that my piece contained one big weakness. Apparently, this relates to my observation that at Q “bridges are favored over lines in the sand.” Toly replies, “While Q organizers and participants might find this refreshing, Murdock finds it obscurantist, lending a dangerously false sense of reconcilability to what might actually be irreconcilable positions.” Continue Reading »