Professor, Wheaton College (IL). PhD, Ancient History. Presenter Undeceptions & First Hymn. Far from home. 🇦🇺 All my links: https://xitter.cf/t.co/IXilWREuTz
Wheaton, Illinois.
Joined July 2009
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I teach a class here at @WheatonCollege on the history of Christianity, focused on the first thousand years. One thought haunts me. We are right to look with shock and disappointment at the way medieval Christians accepted violence as a norm. 1/
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Undeceptions is back with a new season, new look, and new website! @DrFrancisYoung joins @johnpauldickson in this week's episode, 'The Pagans'. Listen wherever you get your podcasts - now in audio AND video.
No sympathy needed, friends, but I want to pay honour to William Reid Dickson, my father, who died in a plane crash on this day 50 years ago. He was a larrikin, a self-made businessman, and, so the story goes, unusually strong. I remember his dulcet voice like it was yesterday.
I also honour my dear mother, Gillian, who somehow picked herself up all those years ago and raised three boys on her own.
Come join my Doctor of Ministry program at @WheatonCollege! Six courses and a thesis, exploring the wisdom of the ancient past and the challenges of our complex present, with a stellar cast of guest lecturers, including Drs Sam Chan, Rebecca McLaughlin, Amy Orr-Ewing, and legendary journalist Peter Wehner. All focused on one big theme: “Communicating Christ in Skeptical Times.”
Wherever you are in the world, enrollments are now open for the next cohort of my future besties, starting October 2027! Some pics from today's class below! Details here: wheaton.edu/graduate-school/…
This really is a great book.
The gospel really is an enchanting, wondrous story.
For those who know Jesus, happiness in this life anticipatory. It points ahead to Something far greater.
From my new book:
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Take a moment to think back on a moment in your life when you felt deeply happy. Perhaps as a child, waking up and suddenly realizing it is the first day of summer vacation. Perhaps when you were falling in love and it first hit you: They love me back! Perhaps it was achieving a dream, or holding your child, or enjoying a simple moment of tranquility in nature.
What does that moment mean, ultimately?
If Jesus rose from the dead, then that moment was a messenger, whispering to you of Something far greater out ahead. It’s telling you something you cannot learn in any other way.
Thus, when you first arrive in heaven, your life will finally have a settled, unified interpretation. And all the joys you have ever known will be gathered into their crescendo—what they really meant all along.
And it will never stop. In fact, it will keep getting better—forever.
If it sounds too good to be true, you are grasping what I’m talking about.
We’ve been promising this for a long time. We just couldn’t find the right guests — until now.
Here’s our episode “On Slavery” from the Bible to the present, with The Rev'd Dr Prof @esaumccaulley and @IJM's Jim Martin (@ijmaus).
Wherever you listen to your podcasts, or head to the @undeceptions library: undeceptions.com/podcast/on-…
Brittle men fret about a joyful 2-minute statement from an Indigenous woman welcoming everyone to the land her ancestors have loved for 60,000 years. There was no scolding, no demand for an apology, no talk of reparations — just a simple invitation from an ancient people to enjoy this place and this day. Happily, the crowd — if not the fragile online scolds — cheered.
Has any country ever fallen off harder than Australia? When I was a kid, Australians were seen as tough and rugged. Steve Irwin types. Now the word “Australia” is synonymous with gay bullshit like this. Gay bullshit appears to be the country’s main export. Like Canada but with bigger spiders. What a shame.
@bookingcom I need some help. We’re en route from the US to Oxford, but our prepaid accommodation is unreachable. I’ve repeatedly emailed and called the property; Booking.com has also emailed and called, with no response, and the phone is disconnected. One of your agents promised cancellation and alternative accommodation within 45 minutes; nothing arrived. Three hours later I called again and got another agent who gave completely different advice, insisting we turn up at 3pm tomorrow—but we haven’t even been given the address!
I also reached out to two online agents. Both left in the middle of my explaining our situation—I have the screenshots. They literally “left and ended the conversation.” On one of my calls to you today, I asked to speak to a manager, only to be told — quite curtly — all the managers were busy. You can verify all of this if, as you say, calls are recorded “for quality purposes.” There’s no much quality happening here!
So here I am, on a plane over the Atlantic, with a confirmed and paid booking that has effectively disappeared. We’ve now had to book our own emergency accommodation in Oxford for tomorrow. Could someone at Booking.com please sort this out? I have booking number and pin ready to verify. Please help!
In all of ancient history, there is no clearer endorsement of “empathy”—entering into the feelings of others—than the apostle Paul’s exhortation in Romans 12:15: “Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.”
Another lovely “empathy” passage — in which we are explicitly told imaginatively to enter into the plight of others — appears in another semi-Pauline text:
“Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.” Hebrews 13:3
Every virtue can be skewed to false ends: humility, compassion, purity, etc.
Empathy is no different.
But that is no reason to try to undermine the inherent value of the virtue (as too many are attempting)!
This is a great data graphic for American religion.
Prof John Lennox joins @undeceptions to talk about scepticism and belief, reading widely, and that time communists poisoned him behind the iron curtain. Usual stuff! Wherever you get your podcasts, or head to undeceptions.com/podcast/wit…
So the term "Judeo-Christian," we're told in the @ConversationEDU, "emerged in the 1930/40s" to "combat antisemitism," and yet it also somehow "suppresses Jewishness." Sorry. No. It was already a technical term in historical writing by the 1880s (see attached image), just like the parallel term "Greco-Roman." One referred to the shared distinctives of Christianity and Judaism (e.g., monotheism, poverty relief, Scripture), the other to the shared distinctives of Greece and Rome (philosophy, rhetoric, the pantheon). It is a sad development that the term is now caught up in a culture tug-of-war between left and right.
There is no such thing as 'Judeo-Christian values'. The term hides essential differences between Judaism and Christianity. @UQ_News theconversation.com/pauline-…
Tonight is the quinquennial Australian Census, when the nation tries to learn a bit about itself. I'll be particularly interested to know if those identifying as (any kind of) "Christian" continue to shrink and those saying they have "no religion" continue to grow. I have thoughts. I'd love to know your predictions.
For context, from 2011 to 2016, the proportion of Australians identifying as "Christian" fell by 9.0 percentage points, from 61.1% to 52.1%. From 2016 to 2021, it fell by a further 8.2 percentage points, from 52.1% to 43.9%. Across the decade 2011–2021, Christian identification fell by 17.2 percentage points.
Meanwhile, “No Religion” rose by 7.8 percentage points between 2011 and 2016, from 22.3% to 30.1%. Between 2016 and 2021, it rose by a further 8.8 percentage points, from 30.1% to 38.9%. Across the decade 2011–2021, “No Religion” rose by 16.6 percentage points.
Do you reckon Australia will become even more "post-Christian"? What's your prediction?
A great book coming our way …
Sometimes I'm asked if my apologetic methodology is classical, presuppositional, or something else.
The truth is I don't think it fits neatly into one camp, and I learn from and admire aspects of them all.
In Why Christianity Makes Sense, classical/Thomist arguments are the anchors, a cumulative-abductive appeal is the architecture, and the execution is very existential/Pascalian.
The questions that interest me are:
-What worldview makes the best sense of the whole strange package of reality?
-Why is there something rather than nothing?
-Why is the universe intelligible and ordered?
-Why do we experience moral obligation, beauty, longing, suffering, meaning, and an ache for transcendence?
-And then: what happens when the historical person of Jesus enters the picture?
My answer to that, in my own life and in this book, is Christianity. It makes sense of the mysteries without and the longings within. It's like a house that is both sturdy enough to withstand the storms, but also comfortable and happy enough to call home.
Obviously, everyone who has eaten around the world knows the correct answer is D: you get the glories of the Middle East and Asia, and, with Australia and New Zealand, you get the best meat, veg, and wine with all the influence of Europe.
For the rest of your life, you can only eat food from one of these regions. Which do you choose?
For more maps: brilliantmaps.beehiiv.com/su…
The most consequential Christian thinker of the second century was Irenaeus, writing around AD 180. He offered a devastating critique of the popular Gnostic heresy, riffing off Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. But the more I think about it, his argument applies equally well to many contemporary claims, whether political, moral, or theological, that manipulate words to project an air of profundity while ultimately proving hollow. Check it out.