THE GALLI REPORT - Friday, March 20, 2015

Friday, March 20, 2015

Double-Barreled Mercy Here's a review of a book by Philip Yancey, which also includes an excerpt that refers to the movie The Drop Box. It's like getting a hit from a double-barreled shotgun, one of grace, the other of mercy. Maybe a shotgun is not the best theological metaphor here, but you get the point. Read the book and see the movie if you want to immerse yourself in the splendor of faith.

License to Kill? Here's a disturbing trend that I hope will not continue: Hippocratic-believing professionals, such as faithful Catholics and Muslims, are increasingly being pressured to practice medicine without regard to their personal faith or conscience beliefs. This moral intolerance is slowly being imbedded into law.

Getting High(er) I admire people who dedicate themselves to an activity that has little social prestige or reward. They just do it because there is something about it that fascinates them. That fascination is a divine gift, I believe, and I think it even applies to pole vaulters.

Singing Protest The former editor in chief at Christianity Today wrote a column on the religious roots of civil rights era protest songs like "We Shall Overcome." But the adaptation of hymns to social protest started long before the 1960s: Evangelicalism has always been a song factory. The tunes I listed arose within its most populist forms—which were also a seedbed for abolitionism, the temperance movement, urban ministry, and one vital stream of woman suffrage.

Talking Right I should know better. My business is words. But here are a bunch of words I now see I didn't know how to pronounce. Yikes!

Grace and peace,

Mark Galli Editor, Christianity Today