For an age supposedly committed to science, we’re sure hard to persuade. In fact, it seems like every technological advance makes us more skeptical; we used to trust audio tapes, then photos, and then...  Read More

I had another of those moments this morning when a familiar passage hit me in a completely different way. In this case, it was the story of Jesus running the money changers out of the temple, as told ...  Read More

It used to be axiomatic in law enforcement circles that most crimes boil down to one of two motives: sex or money. Add pursuit of power and I wonder if you have the triumvirate of temptation. And I wo...  Read More

One difference between American soldiers and soldiers of almost any other nation is that American GIs always want to know why they have to do something. Most soldiers just follow orders. I think Ameri...  Read More

What’s fair? I remember when my boyhood sense of justice was offended and I complained to my dad, he’d say, “You’d better hope you never get what’s fair.” I’d like to say he was making a profound theo...  Read More

There’s a difference between being child-like and childish, but because we don’t want to be childish we resist being child-like. We don’t want to be whiny and demanding and unreasonable, so we instead...  Read More

A couple of summers ago I was in a reader’s theater called Things We Couldn’t Say, about the experiences of a young Dutch woman in the resistance during World War II. In one letter to her fiancé she t...  Read More

A 16-century monk named Brother Lawrence, a lay brother in the Carmelite order in Paris, worked his entire career, at his own wish, as a scullery boy - the ones who clean up and wash dishes. His reaso...  Read More

One thing all Christians know is doubt. Most of the time it has its roots in misunderstanding: we just can’t see what God might be doing in a given situation. Sometimes we legitimately wonder about th...  Read More

Sometimes I reread my favorite books. In fact, there are books I may have read eight or ten times in my life. There’s something reassuring about the known; stories can increase in comfort just like ol...  Read More

I wonder if normal life isn’t one of the challenges we face as we try to live faithful lives.The writer of Ecclesiastes notes that the simple routines of our daily lives - eating, work, sleep, fellows...  Read More

Situational ethics is pretty much the norm these days - too often we decide how to act based on immediate factors rather than bedrock principles. Obeying traffic laws, telling the truth, working on Su...  Read More