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“Is There A Case for Foreign Missions?”  That was the title of a speech delivered by the writer, Pearl Buck, for a packed gathering organized by the Presbyterian Church in November 1932.  Buck, in summarizing four decades of experience as a missionary kid, wife and teacher in China, was grappling with the deeply problematic inheritance…

My hubby and fellow saint and sinner Paul Dover ran across this article from the BBC which brought tears to my eyes.  It’s about a guy named Jeff Ragsdale who, finding himself alone in the aftermath of a devastating break-up, put up fliers around New York City with his number and a simple message: If…

I was practically lizzing yesterday (to borrow Elizabeth Lemon’s term in “30 Rockefeller”) when I heard this story from someone I ran into the other day.  Apparently he had not set foot in a church for years when he visited one on a recent Sunday morning, with the hope that returning to church would help…

Alan Hirsch’s latest book, The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church, co-authored with Tim Catchim, is on my must-read list. Apparently, Hirsch’s main point, according to Hirsch’s Books and Culture reviewer, Gregory Metzger, is this: the five-fold model for ministry set out by the apostle Paul in Ephesians 4- “apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds…

Fellow saint and sinner Saskia de Vries, whom we recently spoke with about neuroscience and theology (see our four-part interview, The Brain on Faith) is also a preacher.  She preached the below sermon to her congregation yesterday, and kindly agreed to share it with the rest of us.  Her elaboration on the essence of biblical faith,…

Resurrection is on my mind this week as I prepare to preach tomorrow on the passage from John 11, where Jesus in raising Lazarus from the dead describes Himself as “The Resurrection and The Life.” Maybe this is why the British band Keane’s single, “Silenced by the Night,” from their latest album, Strangeland, moved me this…

“1.4 million lack power amidst relentless heat,” or so go the headlines these days. Here in Atlanta over the past weekend, the heat index was upwards of 110 degrees.  It was so hot that simply stepping out to get the mail felt like walking through a sauna, and the local pool offered free, unlimited, weekend…

Two days ago someone I know who I would prefer not to know made me very angry. I was so angry that when I went grocery shopping, I left all of my purchased bags of groceries in my shopping cart in the parking lot and then drove all the way home to discover they weren’t…

Hope you’re having a fun Fourth! I’m struck by how holidays like these, during which we celebrate some aspect of what it means to belong to a particular nation, can be much like religious rituals, insofar as they give a certain shape or story line to our often inchoate, often fragmented experiences. The words of…

Last night I was reading an excerpt from Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography, The Prime of Life, in which she describes in almost ecstatic tones the wonder of working and living on her own as a writer and philosopher.  She was free to do as she pleased- to come and go and eat and sleep and…
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