If you’re one of those “it’s all going to burn up anyway” Christians, in love with your dispensationalism, there’s a good chance you’ll be eating a big slab of meat tonight, cooked over a fire (maybe burn a few California Redwoods?), complemented by a pesticide laced...

Survey the landscape of American Christianity on any given Sunday and you’ll find plenty of evidence that God is on the throne, we’re walking in victory, and Satan’s utterly crushed.  There are lots of praise choruses about our victory and God’s goodness, along with clapping...

David Brooks’ excellent article about this week’s quake in Haiti is a must-read. Whether you agree with his diagnosis or not, he shines a light on a problem that absolutely must be addressed: there is no formulaic relationship between monetary aid and economic development/autonomy.  Haiti...

The school where I’m teaching this week is in the Bavarian region of Germany, a predominantly Catholic part of the country in contrast to the prevalence of Protestantism in the North. Both Protestant and Catholic claim to follow Jesus and declare without hesitation that “Jesus is Lord”....

I wake this morning intending to skip rope in the backyard forest, but as I sip my morning coffee, the sunrise is too inviting for such confinement. I’ll run the stairs at the Aqua Theater while the sky gives me a light show to ease the pain. As I’m jogging down to the lake, the husky pup...

The Bible: Maybe the most dangerous idol? In Exodus 20, the very first of God’s ten commandments is His declaration that we must “have no other gods”, and right on the heels of that, we’re warned against “graven images”, which is a warning against fabricating gods...

It seems like everyone I know has been to, or is going to, hear u2 live in October.  They’re out on the west coast doing a tour, and so Christians between 20 and 40 are making the pilgrimage. Before I continue, I’ll offer the caveat that I love u2.  I just returned from running stairs and Bono...

Susan K. Dailey's "Long's Peak" A few years ago I spend some time in Colorado with my son, trying to climb Long’s Peak (and throwing up instead), and then climbing other, lesser peaks, and doing a little rock climbing.  It was intended to be a sort of “vision quest”...

It’s easy to be critical of the church, especially retrospectively. Like Monday morning quarterbacks, we can all look back through the centuries and see the folly of crusades, colonization, slavery, and the unholy marriage of political power and wealth with the name of Jesus. These failures are,...

It’s a good weekend for looking back, what with Woodstock and all that. My looking back though, doesn’t go quite that far, since I was only 13 when the festival came down, and living on the wrong coast. Instead, I looked back this weekend, to an island, and was reminded of the parable about...