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My wood-pallet compost bin is decomposing. Not only the leaves and coffee grounds and eggshells inside it, but the bin itself. It desperately needs to be replaced. But this is a truth I would rather not face. It is, to borrow the title of a recent movie, an inconvenient truth. For replacing my compost bin requires some work on my part--racking down four more pallets, hammering them together, slopping some paint on the finished product to make it look respectable.…

As I sing the servant song during evening worship, a familiar image recurs. In my imagination, I am standing on a dock, reaching down to help someone from dangerous water. Whenever I sing, "Lord, let me lift up those who are weak," this image occurs--with variations. Sometimes I am on shore, sometimes at the edge of quicksand. And sometimes cynicism tempts me. I wonder as I sing, "If God put us on earth to help others, what on earth did…

I love Winston Churchill stories. One of my favorites is the one that concerns the Dutch prime minister in exile during the Second World War. He f led to England after the Nazi invasion and soon after his arrival, there was a meeting arranged with Sir Winston Churchill in a London hotel. Churchill had already become legendary. The Dutch ambassador, when Sir Winston entered the hotel lobby, became f lustered and his grasp of English was none too certain; so…

Traveling on foot through the Cevennes in France, with a view to writing about the place and the people, Robert Louis Stevenson decided to buy a donkey (which he named "Modestine") to carry his supplies. Never having worked with a donkey before, he soon found that what he thought was an accessory to his trip became the central focus--even to the point of becoming the title of the book, Travels with a Donkey. In it, Stevenson described how Modestine would…

The Pope's recent quotations both from Byzantine emperor Manuel II and verses from the Koran were intended as commentary on the history of rationalism, and his audience understood this not as an insult to Islam but rather as criticism of prevailing Western views about liberty and reason. The reaction, however, from nearly every quarter outside his immediate audience was that he offended the religion of Islam. I wonder if the Reformed tradition's own Karl Barth might bring forth a helpful…

Paul Jonathan Willis after Charles Harper Webb As in the Apostle Paul, of course-- a big name, though the word means little. I've always found it hard to pronounce, hard to fit that l on the end, as if it were the paw of a cat that couldn't scratch her signature. But evangelicals like Paul better than they like Jesus, given the fact that Jesus told confusing stories but Paul excelled in the prototype of the three-point sermon. I am…

Reading prominent theological ethicists and social philosophers over the last couple of decades, one might get the impression that liberal democratic values and Christian beliefs are fundamentally at odds. On the one side, liberals, like John Rawls and R ichard Rorty, have worried that religious beliefs are "conversation stoppers" that endanger public consensus in a free and diverse society. They would protect liberal democracy by excluding or severely curtailing the expression of religious convictions in the public realm. On the…