This summer my son Nathan and I took a ten-day adventure to Isle Royale–that long green stone nestled in the northwestern waters of Lake Superior. For six days and five nights, we lived with the foxes, moose, red squirrels, and wolves that had arrived on the island long before humans. They were most neighborly hosts. A moose and her calf stepped aside to share the path at Lake Ritchie, a fox helped herself to plump grasshoppers springing about at our…
In the give and take of any healthy community, you’ll generally find the curmudgeon, the grumpy one on the fringe of the circle. Though we often laugh at their witticisms, we just as often fuss about their cynicisms. “Can’t she see the good in anything?” we say. “Doesn’t he ever do anything but tear down?” But where would we be without the grumpy ones? Bandwagoners abound. Trained by advertisers and public relations professionals, most of us are willingly herded into…
We are not individuals placed in the world to seek our own pleasure but members of a community bound together in love, which finds one of its highest and fullest expressions in marriage and the family. In our intimate relationships, as in larger settings such as the church, we should show love and respect and live in mutual submission to each other.
Africa is dying. Americans are luxuriously distant from that, sitting in their easy chairs, watching TV ads that assert “AIDS is a great plague upon humanity that has already claimed the lives of over 21 million people.” AIDS is rather different for me. It’s personal, and about this I don’t have a choice. My parents moved the family to Ethiopia when I was seven years old. There, I have seen the staggering statistics as actual, very real people staggering towards…
For anyone who parents, works with families, wonders about the nature of the spiritual life and its connection to families, cares about learning, or teaches others in any of these areas, The Power of God at Home: Nurturing Our Children in Love and Grace comes as a welcome relief and pleasure, even inspiration. As J. Bradley Wigger makes clear from the outset, this is not another “how to” book that inadvertently instills in the reader feelings of guilt or inadequacy…
What it means to be an American and a Christ follower is the defining question for the American church today. There, in the wet grass and the fog, with the ashes already cooling, I struggled to discern a way to be both.
These essays teach the attentive reader a great deal about how difficult it is to live through revolutions, and how inadequately prepared most of us are to respond to the challenges that make up so much of our political and religious lives.
How did we get to a point wherein significant educational inequities – injustices – seem intractable? And why aren’t Christians shouting from the rooftops about it? Why doesn’t educational injustice seem to make the list of our primary concerns? Or maybe even our secondary concerns?
Movies have long occupied contested terrain in religious circles. A Christian writer in the 1930s described Hollywood as the “place where Satan has his throne.” In their desire to spread the gospel, evangelicals became leaders in the development of all the major media–except motion pictures. Matthew Crouch, producer of the evangelical sci-fi film, The Omega Code, said, “My dad was sincerely told by his mother, ‘If you go into the theater and see Roy Rogers and Dale Evans ride their…
