We have a TV in our home. It rarely gets used. So I can't claim to be an expert on television programming. However, when I have occasionally engaged in a 30 minute channel flipping exercise, I am shocked--shocked by the content, yes, somewhat, but more so by the lack of variety. All the imagery that greets me from the flickering screen is blandly uniform regardless of the channel I call home. I am beginning to think that the worst part…

During the great missionary era of the nineteenth century, many servants of God from different denominations went over land and seas to far off places carrying with them the greatest gift they could ever offer to people whom they had never known or seen before, namely, the redeeming and liberating Good News of Jesus Christ. His gospel of the grace and the love of God is found to be so revolutionary and subversive that recently it was reported in the…

As a Christian, I habitually pray not to be led into temptation and to be delivered from evil. These are times in which those prayers become especially urgent. As war, on whatever front, becomes more likely, we are surrounded with temptations and we desperately need the wisdom to discern good and evil. Political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain emphasizes that the problem with thinking about the ethics of war is that the very rhetoric of war invites us "to hate without…

My daddy died on January 2, 2003. He was 94 years old. For the past three years he was a resident of the Van Andel Pavilion, a unit of the Holland Home system in Grand Rapids, Michigan that specializes in the care of those with Alzheimer's. Daddy's Alzheimer's was not advanced but was obvious: memory loss, especially short term, living in the past and confusion about the present. Occasionally he'd wonder, "Where am I?"--"What am I doing here?"--"Where's mother?" (meaning…

Many people who have investigated the relationship between theology and science realize that no single model is adequate to serve as a general description of this relationship. The manner in which these two fields relate to one another (or fail to relate, as the case may be) varies greatly from place to place. Hence, some writers from more mainline traditions have been known to declare with confidence that the days of conflict between people of faith and people of science…

Reading the story of David and Goliath recently (I Samuel 17), I found myself wondering what the cheeses were all about. In the midst of an otherwise dramatic story, the narrator lingers over the homely details of Jesse's instructions to his son David concerning bread and cheese. David is to take an ephah of roasted grain and ten loaves of bread to his brothers who are camped with the Israelite army. That's understandable--it's hungry work fighting Philistines. But it is…