This is an excerpt from Chapter 6 in Sinner Saint: A Surprising Primer to the Christian Life (1517 Publishing, 2025). Sinner Saint is available today from 1517 Publishing.
On its journey from Byzantium to Constantinople to Istanbul, this special place helps us understand the broader arc of Christian history, which goes on until Christ's return.
We needn’t fear statistics and studies as palm readings into a certain future. God is God, and his Spirit is alive through his Word.

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The only thing Hobbits love more than a good meal, is good company with whom they can share it.
People lamented that ancient paganism was dead, but the same people who profess that they would love an old pagan feast ignore Christmas, where the best of paganism has survived.
Nonetheless, if we wish to treat apologetics as a practical endeavor for concrete engagement with people who ask about Christianity, it seems best to start with the questions young people are actually asking.
We believers are those who have been called out for a special healing mission in the world because we’ve caught a glimpse of the heavenly city.
I have found that Gandalf’s words above ring true, not only in Middle-earth, but in our world as well.
She had obviously heard about Jesus previously, maybe even from off-handed comments or even rumors. Her daughter was sick so she sought the gossiped-about Jesus as he was leaving for Tyre and Sidon.
It is Tolkien's adept ability at combining imagination with Sub-Creation to give his fictional world of Middle-Earth that ‘inner consistency of reality’ which points to the truth of the Gospel.
Instead of answering this question theoretically, perhaps it will be easier to illustrate the problem of understanding God through our human speculation by considering the legend of St. George and the Dragon.
Paul's conversion is a death and resurrection story. And in reality, so is every conversion, whether it was an awe-inspiring experience like Paul's or not. Dead to sin and alive in Christ.
The 21st century is simply not compatible with a reformational mindset. Daniel Dennett argues in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995) that conservative Christians better serve their secular neighbors as specimens in a cultural zoo, relics of a bygone world.
Every child builds. Some build castles out of wooden blocks handed down from an older sibling. Some construct forts out of blankets, chairs, and miscellaneous living room artifacts.
In some ways, though, it seems that scientism may increasingly be the greater of the two dangers in American higher education. Not only has Helen Rittelmeyer, for example, made a case for relativism (at least in the ethical realm) being effectively dead and buried.