01 Oct 2014

Round Table: Communion

Perhaps no facet of Christian theology is more important and more often debated than understandings of Communion. Instituted by the Lord Jesus the night before his death, the practice of communing with fellow Christians using bread and wine (or, in some early Christian communities, cheese and wine) reaches back to the earliest Jesus Movement and continues to form and define Christians today. In order to demonstrate both the unity and diversity of Christian perspectives on

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29 Sep 2014

Christ and Consumer Culture: The Market’s Moral Morass

As I type on my computer screen, I look to my left and see a bag of fast food I grabbed from the University food court. I know not where the various ingredients came from nor what’s actually in my food. I don’t know how well the employees are paid or are treated at the fast food establishment, but I know the cost was cheap and the food seemed fresh enough. The food appeared as

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15 Sep 2014

Christ and Consumer Culture: Small Groups and the Body of Christ

At Conciliar Post, we bring together a lot of Christians from various traditions who love to read, write, and think. This is a beautiful thing.  On this website, we want to challenge people to understand the gospel more deeply, appreciate the riches of church history and wisdom, and begin to see our daily lives and current events with the eyes of Christ. As much as I wish it were not so, this way of doing

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01 Sep 2014

Christ and Consumer Culture: Stuff and Salvation

One of the standard narratives of today’s age is that Americans are obsessed with stuff. We are said to be hedonistic materialistic monsters that will stop at nothing to possess the next new thing. In this critique of the current day and age, we are all the rich young ruler of Matthew 19, rejecting Christ due to our attachment with our many possessions. In our consumer culture, as Bill McKibben argues, we are compelled to

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18 Aug 2014

Christ and Consumer Culture

We are all consumers. As finite, dependent, embodied human beings, all of us need goods and services to survive, flourish, and enjoy the lives we each possess. For Americans, the vast majority of our consumption comes by means of the wages we receive from our employers, rather than home production as in agrarian societies. So the simple question arises, “How should Christian congregations and individuals faithfully engage with the modern market economy as consumers?”1 This

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06 Aug 2014

Round Table: Christian Unity

A central task of Conciliar Post involves the gathering together of Christians from various traditions in order to reflect upon important issues. As author Stephen Sutherland reminded us in a post a few weeks ago, however, we must understand the purpose and appropriate use of ecumenism: “If good rules make for good neighbors and housemates, maybe a clearer understanding of what it means to be ecumenical can do the same here.” The topic of this

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04 Aug 2014

The Idol of Truth

I always had this odd thought in the back of my mind that ran something like, “If the smartest people in the world thought and thought and read and read for a while, they more than likely would turn out atheists. Atheism, though I don’t believe it to be true, is probably what intelligent thoughts lead to.” And so I typed “Atheism vs. Christianity” into YouTube at age sixteen, intent on discovering whether Christianity had

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22 Jul 2014

Reformed Theology and Social Justice

In my previous post, I discussed the necessity of having a worldview of creation and resurrection to form a coherent vision of social justice, one in which we can be confident our work in the present will come to fruition in the resurrection.  In this article, I want to extend the discussion to the particularities of the Reformed tradition, hoping to see what a Calvinistic worldview has to say about social justice.  I will argue

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08 Jul 2014

Round Table: Same-Sex Marriage

Having just passed the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s DOMA decision and with the Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly’s recent vote, the issue of Same-Sex Marriage remains much discussed and oft debated in our culture. To help us think more clearly about this subject, we asked the Conciliar Post team and a few guest authors to offer their thoughts on some aspects of Same-Sex Marriage in a Round Table format. Round Tables are where

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07 Jul 2014

Social Justice Without the Resurrection Is Dead

In today’s cultural climate, much is thrown around concerning the term “social justice.” Many are passionate about seeing the many injustices and oppressions of this world reversed into true human flourishing, and seeing the way the world is as different from the way the world ought to be. The primary worldview used as the foundation and motivation for this term is a notion of “progress,” fueled by a passion to make the world better. While

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23 Jun 2014

Brand Management: Polo and the Cross

This fall I will be a senior at Wake Forest University—a private school located in Winston-Salem, NC, which is characterized by beautiful people, pretty clothes, stunning architecture, and high tuition.  Looking around at the majority of the students, a newcomer will no doubt recognize the upper middle class clothing that appears on the student body; Sperrys, button downs, khaki shorts, sun dresses, and the brands of Southern Tide, Brooks Brothers, Vineyard Vines, Nike, and Polo.

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16 Jun 2014

Business as Usual

Manufacturing Costs=DM + DL + MOH The above equation is one of the important formulas learned within Accounting 221, one of the required courses all business majors at Wake Forest University take. Here we learn how to do internal accounting, making sure the business knows what costs make up its operations, thus being able to use that data in order to cut costs in the future. In this formula calculating the manufacturing costs that comprise

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