Author: Gordon Govier

LOS ANGELES — Scot McKnight, a religious studies professor, was teaching a number of years ago when he had an "aha" moment.McKnight had just read aloud the Magnificat, the Virgin Mary’s hymn of praise from the Gospel of Luke. "What kind of woman would have said this?" McKnight asked his students at North Park University in Chicago. Read more.The Mary We Never Knew

REVIEWThe Passion of The Christ was an independent movie, paid for entirely out of Mel Gibson’s pocket. The Prince of Egypt was an animated film that emphasized the common ground between Jews, Christians and Muslims. The Last Temptation of Christ was a low-budget art-house flick based on a heretical novel.You would have to go back at least as far as King David, the mid-1980s box-office flop starring Richard Gere, to find another live-action movie produced by a major Hollywood studio and based directly on the Bible. And you would have to go back even further—to the bathrobe epics of the…

On a recent Sunday morning, Steve Haas arrives at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to meet a group of Seattle pastors and church members. Haas, a former cleric at one of the country’s best-known evangelical megachurches, Willow Creek Church in Chicago, is leading the group on a trip to Africa. Milling about the KLM ticket counter with him are several people from University Presbyterian Church carrying long thin black bags that make a clanking sound; inside are pipes for a well pump they are bringing at the request of a missionary in Kenya. Read more.

WASHINGTON (ABP) — America’s first female secretary of state said Nov. 20 the United States must begin educating its current and future diplomats on faith issues in order to have success in the foreign-policy arena.Echoing the thesis of her new book, The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God and World Affairs, Madeleine Albright told the nation’s largest gathering of religion professors that the ignorance of policymakers toward religion is dangerous for the United States. Read more.

Promise Keepers, the international ministry to men, has wrapped up its 16th season of conferences. In this year’s season, they’ve reached more than 132,000 men with the Gospel, with over three-thousand men giving their lives to Christ. This year’s meetings helped men discover their God-given potential, hone their talents and move ahead with accountability. The PK team is now looking ahead to 16 specially focused shorter events around the US events in 2007. Read more.

WASHINGTON (BP)–Not only do the news media need to change in order to report more accurately and justly on evangelical Christians, but evangelicals themselves can do things differently to affect their portrayal, panelists at a recent theological meeting said.A panel consisting of a Southern Baptist ethics leader, a Christian radio talk show host, an ABC News producer and former religion writers for two major news magazines discussed evangelicals and the media during a Nov. 17 session of the annual Evangelical Theological Society meeting at the Washington Hilton.Read more.

CommentaryThe players in studio power offices call it the "Passion Playbook."At least, that’s what the Variety — holy writ in Hollywood — calls the slate of commandments that insiders are supposed to be following in order to reach the $612 million audience that backed "The Passion of the Christ." Or was it the $744 million audience that embraced "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe"?Whether or not a savvy consultant has produced an actual "Passion Playbook" doesn’t matter. Everyone knows that studio executives are becoming more interested in the "Christian market," even if admitting it still…

CommentaryNov. 13, 2006 issue – During my time in the White House, the most intense and urgent evangelical activism I saw did not come on the expected values issues—though abortion and the traditional family weren’t ignored—but on genocide, global AIDS and human trafficking. The most common request I received was, "We need to meet with the president on Sudan"—not on gay marriage. This reflects a head-snapping generational change among evangelicals, from leaders like Falwell and Robertson to Rick Warren, focused on fighting poverty and AIDS in Africa, and Gary Haugen, confronting rape and sexual slavery in the developing world. Since…

QUITO, ECUADOR (ANS) It was a bright, sunny, cool day, typical of the Christmas mini-dry season in Quito. My Otavalan Indian friend Pablo and I were standing on the street just a few days before the holiday, discussing how we would celebrate the season. —

Commentary(BP)–America’s most congested travel season is now underway as millions of people are headed home to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. These days, the holiday signals the beginning of the extended Christmas season, and even though an official Thanksgiving observance has long been a familiar part of our American culture, the substance of the observance is very much in question. Read more.