Many of the early Church Fathers associated humor with moral vices and preached against it. The Puritans banned comedies, believing they were inherently immoral. And the Rule of Benedict eschewed “foolish chatter” and urged speaking “nothing just to provoke laughter.” At first glance the Bible might seem to support such a dour outlook on life. …
Q What inspired you to start a website of satirical Christian news? A I had written well-received satire in college. Then I graduated and kind of got serious. Five years into my career as a writer for Christian publishers and magazines, the Holy Spirit began bugging me about creating a satirical Christian newsletter. I resisted …
Prophets such as Isaiah (40:18-20; 41:5-7; 44:9-20) used humor in poking fun at idols to show the folly of idolatry. The apostle Paul used satire and irony when he called usurpers “super apostles” (2 Corinthians 11:5) and when he said that those who taught circumcision was necessary for salvation should go all the way and …
We’ve all been assaulted with the humor that hurts. And, most of us have used humor to hurt someone else. Sometimes those we hurt the most are those we claim to love the most. It’s as if the Golden Rule of Jesus doesn’t apply; as if it is okay to treat others as we’ve been …
But it’s still a topic worth looking at. C. S. Lewis wrote that he divided the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper and Flippancy (You can’t write an evangelical essay and not quote C. S. Lewis. If you try Alister McGrath comes to your house and deletes it from your computer). …
I don’t buy this gloomy assessment. Of course Jesus laughed. Realize we don’t have all the information on Jesus’ life in our New Testament. John says that Jesus did many other things that were not written in his book. So the absence of explicit reference proves nothing. We know that God laughs. The psalms tell …
The last paragraph of G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy goes like this: “Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian…The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost …
