Dale M. Coulter

Last Friday the Gender Parity Project released the results of its study of the role of women among evangelical non-profit organizations. Most of the men surveyed affirmed an egalitarian stance toward women in leadership positions, but the study also found that women have barely broken the twenty percent barrier in terms of board and paid leadership positions. Such findings should not surprise. Women play complicated roles in Evangelicalism, all worked out within the framework of Protestantism’s emphasis on maximizing lay participation. Continue Reading »

As Robert Louis Wilken has noted on more than one occasion, Maximus the Confessor’s use of the phrase “blessed passion of love” evokes ideas that were important to Christian tradition. Continue Reading »

Having taught a number of years at an undergraduate institution within the evangelical world, I observed on more than one occasion students who wrestled with the particular brand of Christianity in which they had been raised. Continue Reading »

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of Reinhold Niebuhr’s attempt to place the democratic experiment on more firm ground. His The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness represents Niebuhr’s effort to save democracy from itself. Continue Reading »

Recent global events have highlighted the ongoing challenge of ethnic and tribal divisions. Americans have also been reminded by events in Ferguson that divisions along race and ethnic lines are just down the street. These ongoing divisions forcefully highlight the need for greater efforts at ecumenism. Continue Reading »

Despite the lower mortality rates and longer life spans of the postmodern condition, the reality of death still looms large. Globalization and the new networks of social media keep death before the mind of a global public on a daily basis. The Gothic in literature and the arts pours forth at a . . . . Continue Reading »

The pope’s apology to Pentecostals during his visit to the church pastored by Giovanni Traettino speaks to the importance of memory. As Augustine recounts in his Confessions, the memory is a vast storehouse of many chambers filled with countless images. Continue Reading »

On most Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox liturgical calendars today marks the Feast of the Transfiguration. For conservative evangelicals, the transfiguration has apologetic weight since it points toward the deity of Christ. As important as this aspect of the transfiguration might be, however, it’s greater significance resides elsewhere. Standing between Jesus’ baptism and ascension, Christian tradition interprets this event both in its iconography and doxology as a revelation of Christ’s divinity, a foretaste of the eschaton, and a pledge of the perfectibility of the human person. Continue Reading »

A recent joint statement by a number of Italian evangelical groups indicts the Roman Catholic Church as an “imperial” church and its call for evangelicals to “unionist initiatives that are contrary to Scripture and instead renew their commitment to take the gospel of Jesus Christ to the whole world.” Continue Reading »

When Flannery O’Connor called the south Christ-haunted, she was thinking not least of its freaks. The role of the freak takes on a theological tone in grotesque southern fiction because “it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some . . . . Continue Reading »