This Major Biblical Theme Is a Surprising Root of the Manhood Problem
Single motherhood is becoming the new norm for how children are raised. In 2014:
4 out 10 children were born to unwed mothers; More than 80% of all single-parent families in America are headed by women; 1 in 4 children (17.4 million) are being raised without a father.
Carolyn Custis James calls this new fatherless norm an “epidemic” in her new book Malestrom, which explores, clarifies, and remedies the problem of manhood. She argues this fatherhood disaster stems from “a powerful malestrom undertow,” (78) resulting in violence, patriarchy, and male identity confusion.
Surprisingly, not only is this major feature of the malestrom a major theme of the male experience. It’s also a major biblical theme.
Some of us understand it well. It’s what James calls the father wound.
Father Wound Defined
James contends the root cause of much…
Extracurricular Activities 4.24.15 — Joseph Typology, Pope Francis, & George Whitfield
Fred Sanders Explores Joseph Typology in Jesus
“It sure seems that the story of Joseph is a typological foreshadowing of the life of Jesus,” mused Peter Leithart recently, and I have to agree. It sure seems so! Leithart went on, in his post, to describe the kind of mental abstraction required to read the Joseph story that way; a “Proppian structural move that captures a common morphology” [had to look up “Proppian!“]
There’s a reason Leithart needed to spend some time theorizing about how to make the case. The peculiar and stubborn fact is that the New Testament never invokes the Joseph story as something fulfilled or figured out in the life of Jesus. So preachers who want to make Christological hay with Joseph have to do it on their own, without explicit scriptural warrant.
The Most Significant People, Places, and Events in the Bible: Joseph
If you’ve been a teacher or pastor for long, you know that people learn in different ways. In fact, much human understanding occurs visually. When it comes to quickly grasping and retaining information, the human brain functions best with a combination of both words and pictures.
That’s where a new innovative, helpful resource from Zondervan comes in, called The Most Significant People, Places, and Events in the Bible.
Like an infographic survey of Scripture, this visual guide to the Bible makes it accessible and memorable for students, laypeople, and anyone curious to know more about God’s Word. In under 200 pages it presents dozens of at-a-glance snapshots that visually communicate key stories and insights in the Bible in an informative and understandable way through:
QuickView Summaries—outlines of Bible books and sections QuickGlance Bible…