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As if ISIS had not already convinced us enough of its total depravity … the latest revelations by The New York Times —(be forewarned, they are disturbing to read) — remind me why I am not a pacifist. As if turning small boys into child soldiers is not enough to raise the ire of the…

Three years ago, when pastor, seminary professor and author A.J. Swoboda’s first book Messy made its debut, I said I hoped the book would not be his last; so when a review copy of Swoboda’s second book, A Glorious Dark, arrived in the mail last week, I was like a kid on Christmas morning unwrapping…

This Sunday the preacher said faith is the gap between the kingdom of God we only catch faint glimpses of and that which is coming. I like that. In days like these, when just about everywhere I turn the shit seems to have hit the fan, in Ukraine, the Holy Land, and close to home,…

  My favorite poem from the recent series by Andrew Sullivan (The Dish), Poems from the Year, contains refrains from the Old Testament, especially Ecclesiastes.  Even today’s reading from Nehemiah 8, where “the joy of the Lord is my strength,” sounds more poignantly relevant when considered next to the poetic wisdom of Gilbert: “A Brief…

A shorter, storybook version of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe for younger children comprised last night’s bedtime reading ritual.  A five-year-old boy and three-year-old girl snuggled up next to their mother to hear with bated breath how the majestic lion, Aslan, took on the sinister White Witch in the magical land…

Yesterday’s pool excursion with my son, Cameron, may have been a big divine hint that I need to do more preparation for Sunday’s small group discussion on the nature of evil.  My son, afterall, unlike me or my esteemed cohorts, is not a self-described cynic, skeptic or religious misfit.  He is just a mostly typical…

The massacre at a movie cinema late Thursday night was a tragedy. It can be a lesson, too.  The question is, a lesson about what exactly?  As usual, the devil is in the details. In the days following a deranged gunman’s diabolical dress-up as the Joker, accompanied by a show-and-tell routine of live ammunition at…

I’m struck this morning by the prescience of yesterday’s poem, coming as it did (without my knowledge at the time of posting it) in the wake of the tragedy that struck  late Thursday night at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado: “Life the hound, Equivocal, Comes at a bound, Either to rend me, Or to befriend me.” Life…comes…

  For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. – Ephesians 6:12 (King James Version) This week the man at the center of the Penn State scandal, former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, was convicted on…

Today is the 70th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Probably the closest thing for my generation to that surprise attack by Japanese planes on Pearl Harbor in the year 1941 is 9/11.  On Saturday evening a friend and I visited the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero. When the taxi dropped us off at the entrance, we…
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