Dr Paul Allen

Jesus is considered by scholars such as Weber to be an example of a charismatic religious leader. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) There’s only one absolute way I know of to keep your Christian growth from becoming stagnant , and that is to die. The only time Christian growth stops altogether is at death. That’s because we don’t need to grow any further; we’re ushered into the state of glorification. If a person is in Christ and Christ is in that person, it is impossible for the Christian not to move, to grow. It may seem at times as if our Christian growth has been totally arrested and is in a stagnant state, but I think that’s merely an outward appearance. Obviously our Christian growth can move at various speeds, and we tend to have a kind of ebb and flow. Sometimes we’re moving ahead in leaps and bounds and other times at a snail’s pace. When it’s moving in such a laboriously slow fashion, we may think that it has become utterly stagnant. Again, if there is no evidence of growth ...

Image via Wikipedia When Christians practice yoga, they must either deny the reality of what yoga represents or fail to see the contradictions between their Christian commitments and their embrace of yoga. The contradictions are not few, nor are they peripheral. Some questions we ask today would simply baffle our ancestors. When Christians ask whether believers should practice yoga, they are asking a question that betrays the strangeness of our current cultural moment — a time in which yoga seems almost mainstream. It was not always so . No one tells the story of yoga in the West better than Stefanie Syman, whose recent book,  The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America , is a masterpiece of cultural history . Syman, an engaging author who is also a fifteen-year devotee of yoga, tells this story well.  Her book actually opens with a scene from this year’s annual White House Easter Egg Roll . President Barack Obama made a few comments and then introduced First Lady Michell...