Almost two weeks ago, I was fortunate to have had a conversation with interdisciplinary scholar (and hyper-specialist in Canadian evangelicalism) Dr John Stackhouse. He and I literally live down the road from each other, yet haven’t really chatted before this, and so it was a great opportunity to ask him some questions and get to hear part of his story. We talk about the university where he currently teaches, we talk about what he considers “liberal Christianity” to actually be, he tries to assess whether or not I’m an “evangelical Christian”... a good time was had by all!
At the end of the interview, I mentioned that I did not know what the world would be like in two weeks. I couldn’t have known at that time how true that might be. Even though many of our hearts and minds are heavy with what is going on in Ukraine, we continue to move forward with what we know and what we can explore, which in this episode is namely the hope of the gospel (Christianity’s good news) for the broader world.
In this interview we reference this post of Stackhouse’s on “Civil Disobedience for Christians” (which was actually the hot button issue of two weeks ago), and we talk a little about his most recent book, Can I Believe?.
What did not emerge until just after our conversation was a little back-n-forth between Stackhouse and Christianity Today’s news editor (and another person I recently chatted with), Daniel Silliman about his own attempt at defining evangelicalism. Disagreements can seem spicy, but conversation (whether that’s over coffee or a debate podium) tend to be the only way that ideas move forward.
