‘Love your enemies’ is a phrase as old as the Bible. It is a line we primarily ignore because we don’t know what to do with it – largely because we have no idea what it means. ‘Love’ means to know intimately, and to some degree, respect and value – to have a continuing engagement with...

There was a moment for me when I knew for certain that the cast of Seinfeld weren’t heroes but anti-heroes. It was when Jerry and Elaine were conspiring to become the new people in a separating couple’s life. In the 1996 episode “The Wait Out,” Cary Elwes (from The Princess Bride) and Debra...

Have you ever known anyone imprisoned by a cell of their own making? Perhaps we all do it to some degree, but some do it to the extent that their lives are an ever-shrinking, imploding world of self-absorption.  Indignation can be addictive, and some seem to have been seduced by it entirely. I know...

The other day a friend of mine told me about the time when he was working as a bouncer at a bar. He was studying theology at a university in southeast England at the time. It was the seventies, at the height of the Disco Era. He went on to become a Lutheran pastor. This struck me as hilarious. My friend...

Kids—particularly kids who aren’t yet school age—act weird in church. They don’t play by the same rules as adults: they draw with their crayons, they read their books. I once saw two preschool-aged boys sitting next to each other, each playing a different game on their two iPads. And when they...

It’s beginning to look a little like Christmas. You know what that means? Bell weather. During the Christmas shopping season (known liturgically as “Advent”) men and women brave the cold to stand outside stores, ringing bells and collecting change for the Salvation Army. It’s...

I’ve been tutoring a friend of mine in the history of the U.S. Constitution. He’s homeschooled, but he lost parent-as-teacher privileges for being too cheeky or something. So now he’s being punished by having me and several other novices as his teachers. So at least he’ll learn...

Last year Ben Arment blogged about the first, The Elephant Room a one day gathering of high profile and influential church leaders, who get together to discuss issues that they classify as “Elephants in the room” in the church. So I watched the clip of current and former pastors discussing...

“You keep talking about a relationship with God,” said the woman, a fixture of the church and in pretty much all my church activities. “I don’t understand how that works.” Part of my problem, of course, was that I had been simmering in an evangelical subculture for nigh...

It’s not often that you encounter a living legend. I managed to encounter two in one week recently: I flew to Pittsburgh to see U2 at Heinz Stadium, and I drove to Chicago to see Sir Paul McCartney at Wrigley Field. (Jealous? I thought so.) It’s not like we hung out or anything; these were entirely...