Ar! Shiver me timbers and blow me down. Today be, of course, Talk Like a Pirate Day. Sadly, we have little on our site about pirates. I had high hopes for the recent Christian book Samson and the Pirate Monks: Calling Men to Authentic Brotherhood by Nate Larkin. But beware: the book has nothing in it about pirates.

So I turned instead to Colin Woodard, author of the new and highly acclaimed book that's actually about pirates, The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down.

"The pirates themselves demonstrated little in the way of religion," he told me, unsurprisingly. "But Woodes Rogers [the "Man Who Brought Them Down" of Woodard's title] appears to have been at least partially inspired by his faith, having repeatedly ordered stocks of tracts from the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. Seems he thought part of the way of reforming pirates would be through their spiritual redemption. He arranged for SPCK materials for both an abortive project to reform the pirates of Madagascar and, later, for his mission to the Bahamas."

Woodard talks a bit about this in his book, but that's not what attracted Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler, who recently recommended the book to his blog readers.

"Like the pirates themselves, this book will take your imagination captive," Mohler wrote. "I was taken with the book from its introduction to the end, and I really appreciate Woodard's careful explanation of why the pirates were such important characters on the world scene."

That's about it on Christianity and pirates, at least for this year's TLAPD celebrations. In the meantime, ChristianBook.com sells Pirate Gold Sea Monkeys.

(Oh, and spare me any comments below about I've just spent more time on Talk Like a Pirate Day than on most days of the Christian calendar. I'm well aware of that. Pirates are just much more fun to blog about today than, say, Theodore of Tarsus or Januarius.)

Posted by Ted Olsen at September 19, 2007 | Comments (10)

Sticks and carrots:

At the White House this morning, President Bush ran out of patience with the genocidal regime ruling Sudan. He announced a collection of sanctions against the nation-state of Sudan and individuals associated with the sickening killing and rape still going on in the Darfur region at the western border with Chad.

See this video clip:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2007/05/29/VI2007052900512.html

Here's a link to the Washington Post online article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/29/AR2007052900462.html

The Save Darfur Coalition includes many evangelical groups that should be encouraged by this move. China especially is likely to resist the imposition of sanctions.

We Christians must understand how the situation in Darfur ripples throughout the region and globally. Until there is real peace in Sudan, this region of Africa will remain violent and unstable.

The carrot and the stick are now on the table, Omar Bashir.

Prayer for the persecuted church in Sudan in the south should just be the beginning of our commitment. I agree with President Bush that we cannot "avert our eyes" from this suffering.

Posted by Tim Morgan at May 29, 2007 | Comments (4)

This week I attended the inaugural one-day conference of the Gospel Coalition. This consortium of more than 50 evangelical pastors have united around a common confessional statement and theological vision of ministry. Organizers hope this short conference, hosted by Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and attended by 500+ pastors and other ministry leaders, will propel a long-term effort to renew and reform evangelical thought and practice. D.A. Carson, a New Testament scholar at TEDS, and Tim Keller, senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, organized the group, which has met privately for three years now. Other speakers and workshop presenters included Crawford Loritts, Phil Ryken, Mark Driscoll, and John Piper.

I thought a couple statements stood out in the Gospel Coalition's founding document:

From the preamble: "On the one hand, we are troubled by the idolatry of personal consumerism and the politicization of the faith; on the other hand, we are distressed by the unchallenged acceptance of theological and moral relativism."

From the theological vision of ministry: "If we seek service rather than power, we may have significant cultural impact. But if we seek direct power and social control, we will, ironically, be assimilated into the very idolatries of wealth, status, and power we seek to change."

The Gospel Coalition's core group of pastors plans to meet yearly. Leaders have tentatively planned a national conference for April 2009. A website, www.thegospelcoalition.org, will be forthcoming in June with video of all the conference sessions and loads of links to resources that promote the Gospel Coalition vision.

As Carson told me today, this group could not have come together five years ago. Make of that what you will, but something's stirring in the evangelical movement. The Gospel Coalition seeks nothing less than a return to the theological consensus enjoyed in the days of neo-evangelicalism, led by Billy Graham, Carl Henry, Harold John Ockenga, and many others. That might be a goal more difficult to achieve than pioneering evangelicalism in the post-war Protestant scene, split as it was between fundamentalism and liberalism.

Posted by Collin Hansen at May 25, 2007 | Comments (7)

While running my errands this weekend, I listened to the first three disks of the audiobook, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul. The author is Tony Hendra, a great satirist who was a university chum of John Cleese and Graham Chapman and who went on to become the editor-in-chief of Spy.

It is wonderfully comic for a spiritual memoir, but when the author gets serious, he is full of insight. After the stern and aloof husband of the woman he didn't quite seduce dragged the 14-year-old Tony to a monastery to be admonished and shriven, Hendra had a religious experience in which all the mumbo jumbo he'd been taught as a Catholic child suddenly came alive for him--became real! His description of that almost sounds like the classic evangelical conversion story.

But to my point ...

His conversion turned him on to history. Read these few graphs and think of Bob Webber--or even Tom Oden. This is ancient future stuff transplanted into the life of an English Catholic teen.

... [T]his new grasp of the realness of things ... lit up unexpected areas of my life--areas I'd preferred to ignore or endure up till then. History, once my most and then my least favorite subject, resumed center stage. It had become a tedium to study, a forgettable rat's next of dates and places and people, every one of them stone-cold dead and of no relevance to the here and now. Just as Latin was a dead language, history was a dead subject. I asked Mum once why we had to belong to such an incredibly old religion--weren't there any new ones? (She didn't agree or disagree, but she did give me a lurid pamphlet the Jehovah's Witnesses had left behind.)

Now, driven by the need to dig farther and--just as urgently--to experience the actuality of everything I could, history became my new frontier, the past became my future, a vast terra incognita, every discovery of which was another chunk of virgin territory I could claim, bringing with it the glow of ownership, the anticipatory thrill of further exploration.

What if we gave every new convert a subscription to Christian History & Biography? What if we plied them with the great lovers of God--with Pascal and Augustine and Theresa? What if we taught them that they were part of a very, very old religion--taught them to take seriously the communion of the saints?

It seemed to work for the editor of Spy.

Posted by David Neff at May 14, 2007 | Comments (3)