Postmodern Realities Podcast

There is little doubt that the New Testament makes several unique claims concerning Jesus. Some of these exclusive comments regard claims that Jesus Christ was deity, or that He is the sole path to salvation, or that He was raised from the dead. The claims and deeds of Jesus become even more distinct when compared with the founders of other religious traditions like Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, or Zoroastrianism. Crucially, the claims and actions of other religions founders encompass highly significant historical issues. The most common problem involves the time intervals between the claimed teachings or events and their recording, with usual gaps of hundreds to well over a thousand years. In contrast, the Gospels were written within a few decades after Jesus. Another significant problem concerns identifying when some founders such as Buddha or Zoroaster actually lived, involving differences of a thousand years or more. Hinduism faces huge problems regarding the extant date of the Upanishads, whether Hindu scholars think Krishna even lived, and treating the potential millennia gap with the Bhagavad Gita. Finally, scholars have too often placed world religious claims approximately on a par while failing to look critically at the historical case for the New Testament writings and events vis a vis non Christian claims. This has led to various confusions such as viewing all religious claims as being equally true or likewise historical, or that one religious truth automatically requires the truth of others. Overly critical attitudes toward Christian beliefs while hardly posing any similarly tough questions to the almost always unevidenced, non Christian beliefs reveals a scholarly double standard. This Postmodern Realities podcast episode is a conversation with JOURNAL author Benjamin Shaw about his coauthored with Gary Habermas feature article The Historical Uniqueness of Jesus Christ among the Founders of the Worlds Major Religions in the Volume 41 4 2018 issue of the JOURNAL.

There is little doubt that the New Testament makes several unique claims concerning Jesus. Some of these exclusive comments regard claims that Jesus Christ was deity, or that He is the sole path to salvation, or that He was raised from the dead. The claims and deeds of Jesus become even more distinct when compared with the founders of other religious traditions like Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, or Zoroastrianism. Crucially, the claims and actions of other religions founders encompass highly significant historical issues. The most common problem involves the time intervals between the claimed teachings or events and their recording, with usual gaps of hundreds to well over a thousand years. In contrast, the Gospels were written within a few decades after Jesus. Another significant problem concerns identifying when some founders such as Buddha or Zoroaster actually lived, involving differences of a thousand years or more. Hinduism faces huge problems regarding the extant date of the Upanishads, whether Hindu scholars think Krishna even lived, and treating the potential millennia gap with the Bhagavad Gita. Finally, scholars have too often placed world religious claims approximately on a par while failing to look critically at the historical case for the New Testament writings and events vis a vis non Christian claims. This has led to various confusions such as viewing all religious claims as being equally true or likewise historical, or that one religious truth automatically requires the truth of others. Overly critical attitudes toward Christian beliefs while hardly posing any similarly tough questions to the almost always unevidenced, non Christian beliefs reveals a scholarly double standard. This Postmodern Realities podcast episode is a conversation with JOURNAL author Benjamin Shaw about his coauthored with Gary Habermas feature article The Historical Uniqueness of Jesus Christ among the Founders of the Worlds Major Religions in the Volume 41 4 2018 issue of the JOURNAL

Generation Z the 70 million kids born between 1999 and 2015 is another testament to our cultures alarming slide into secularism. This emerging generation is twice as likely as adults to be atheists, theyre twice as likely to identify as LGBT, theyre committed moral relativists, and only one in eleven can be considered an engaged Christian. Couple this with the fact that many sectors of American culture no longer are friendly to Christianity not merely neutral but hostile to Christian ideas and values. Clearly, Gen Z is a post Christian generation, and the church has a major uphill battle on its hands. Its time for Christian parents and leaders to wake up! Our families and churches are hemorrhaging students. We all know numerous students who spent the first eighteen years of their lives growing up in Christian homes and in the church but who have now walked away. So isnt it time to consider that much of what weve been doing to disciple our kids for last twenty to thirty years is not working? We need some major paradigm shifts in discipleship. Apologetic and worldview training for our students is no longer optional rather, its essential to their discipleship under Jesus in the twenty-first century. This Postmodern Realities episode is a conversation with JOURNAL author Brett Kunkle about his Volume 41 4 feature article, A Practical Guide to Teaching Students Apologetics

HBOs TV series Westworld is a remake and expansion of the 1973 film by writer Michael Crichton about an immersive theme park where guests can interact with artificially intelligent robots programmed to act out cowboy stories from the Old West. The film follows a similar pattern as Crichtons 1990 novel Jurassic Park, but instead of genetically engineered dinosaurs, Westworld features artificially intelligent robots. The robots malfunction and eventually start to attack the parks guests. The HBO version of Westworld adds a new wrinkle to the story the robots violent turn is a result of their becoming self aware. They gradually realize they are robots and attempt to stage a revolution against their human masters in the name of freedom. Such warnings about the dangers of self aware artificial intelligence AI are familiar in science fiction films, from 2001 A Space Odyssey 1968 to The Terminator 1984 to recent standout Ex Machina 2014. Like its predecessors, the new version of Westworld is essentially a Frankenstein story in which an artificial life form turns on its human creators. But the TV series is not simply a cautionary tale about AI technology. It warns us against the uncritical optimism of scientific utopianism, but it also critiques todays culture of social media and video games, embedding these themes in an overarching philosophical and neuroscientific exploration of consciousness and free will. This Postmodern Realities podcast episode is a conversation with JOURNAL author John McAteer about his Volume 41 4 feature article, HBOs Westworld and the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

African American men might be one of the most unreached people groups existing today. In all of the Christian churchs efforts to be obedient to the Great Commission, sharing the gospel with an African American man within our spheres of influence needs to be an important part of our efforts to reach people for Christ. On this episode of the Postmodern Realities podcast, author Eric C. Redmond talks about his Volume 40 5 2017 Effective Evangelism article Reaching African American Men with the Gospel

More than 100 years after his death, Mark Twain remains one of the most colorful and well beloved American authors. Even infrequent readers know of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn who have become iconic characters in the American imagination, and Twains public persona and incisive wit are the stuff of legend. Both prolific and profound, Twain managed to expose social ills and elicit a hearty dose of laughter from his readers, who themselves were often the very targets of his critique. There was a dilemma that defined Twains religious struggles hope for rectifying clear injustice required something uncorrupted by those wrongs. Twain seemed able neither to relinquish his hope for a better world nor to embrace a God of perfect goodness who alone is capable of accomplishing that redemption. This Postmodern Realities podcast episode is a conversation with JOURNAL author Marybeth Baggett about her Volume 41 4 Aug. 2018 feature article, Mark Twains Tightrope Walk, Caught between Despair and Hope

To follow Jesus faithfully means we need to reorient our values and priorities radically. One radical value Jesus proclaimed was that single men and women had equal standing in His kingdom. Society, which up to that point was centered on marriage and family, was now to include those who were unmarried as valued and equal partners. The apostle Paul and church father John Calvin, counter to the thinking of their time, proclaimed the surprising worth of being single and celibate, echoing Jesus words. Singles are complete in Christ just as much as those who are married. But Christian singles do have a life journey that does not include the experiences of sexual expression that married couples enjoy or, to be honest, of those who choose to live outside of Gods design for our sexuality. We know this is not easy, especially as we live in a culture that often proclaims sexual pleasure as the highest of all human experiences and its counterpoint to deny oneself in this area is to live a life of great tragedy. Singles of all ages need a constant infusion of the gospel to steward their sexuality as an overflow of the beauty and power that comes from devotion to Christ. This Postmodern Realities episode is a conversation with JOURNAL author Ellen Dykas about her 2014 feature article, Single in Christ and a Sexual Being which is available free on our website. For more articles about biblical sexuality like the feature article on solo sex masturbation and the Christian, please subscribe to the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL.

What do we do with the Christian spokesperson whose message seems at best tangential to the gospel, and whose megaphone is the national media? How should an everyday, street level apologist handle the backlash the Christian community receives from the very public statements of those who seem to make headlines instead of making a clearly reasoned case for the faith? When it comes to high profile proclamations like these, the gospel doesnt even seem to be in play. It gets lost in a public theater of the absurd and buried under an avalanche of disconcerting rhetoric. Then we are left to deal with the aftermath in our own little corners of the world. Instances like these certainly dont make our evangelism any easier. Unfortunately, there is always the temptation to separate ourselves from the ridiculous by engaging in our own form of ridicule. We want to assure everyone we know that what they just heard in the news is not my Christianity, so we move a little too quickly to throw the offending believer under the bus. If our goal is evangelism, we need to think beyond the immediate relief we feel at separating ourselves from the ridiculous and focus instead on the greater goal of reflecting the character and cause of Christ. This Postmodern Realities episode is a conversation with JOURNAL author Bob Perry about his Volume 41, No. 3 Effective Evangelism article, Mere Ambassadors. To read his article, please subscribe to the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL

A recent trend, which gained traction with a piece released by Planned Parenthood a handful of years ago Moving Beyond ProLife vs. ProChoice Labels, Youre Not in Her Shoes, is attempting to do just that. There is a growing desire that the terms prochoice and prolife be abolished because they do not adequately express feelings about abortion. Most people just dont want to be labeled, proponents claim. They may very well be on to something, but theyre taking things too far. Simply put, labels come with pros and cons. Some labels are associated automatically with stereotypical meanings, which can be exacerbated further by any number of factors that influence individuals culture, education, loyalties, circumstances, media. When labels are thrown out haphazardly, they oftentimes unfairly corral others into groups according to the audiences perception.It may be that the call for abolishing the label prochoice comes from the fact that many identify themselves as personally prolife, while others label them prochoice. These individuals play the moral relativism card by reducing moral truth to mere personal preference. This Postmodern Realities episode is a conversation with JOURNAL author Megan Almon about her 2018 Volume 41, No. 3 Viewpoint article, Whats in a Name? A Growing Trend to Abolish the Labels Prochoice and Prolife.To read her opinion piece, please subscribe to the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL

There is a growing wave of Christian leaders who are rejecting Christianity and becoming some of its most ardent critics, often supported by a plethora of new organizations arising to encourage such people to cut ties to their faith. This is a new challenge from a different breed of critics who are using their instant credibility and insiders knowledge of theology, the Bible, church history, even apologetics, to debunk the faith they once believed and promoted. They have taken aim at the foundations of Christianity, including God, the Scriptures, miracles and the supernatural, and Christianitys perceived inherent prohibition on free enquiry. How do Christians answer these critics? Why did they stop believing and now reject Christianity? This Postmodern Realities episode is a conversation with JOURNAL author Paul Chamberlain about his Volume 41 4 feature article, Why People Stop Believing. To read his review, please subscribe to our JOURNAL. To read his book on which this article is based, please partner with CRI for the month of July 2018 and receive this book as a thank you for your gift.