This week’s musical mental health break comes from the world of folk rock where I stumbled into Parker Millsap and his “Truckstop Gospel,” thanks to a segment on NPR yesterday. Parker Millsap is only 20 but has the voice of an old soul; and his “Truckstop Gospel” plays on the ambiguities of American evangelical Christian…

Yesterday we met Bruce Strom who is helping to grow and steer a movement of lawyers and churches giving a voice to legally disenfranchised (and poor) populations in this country. Today we get a bit more personal, with Bruce sharing how he came to this line of work, leaving a successful and remunerative law practice…

Yesterday I promised you a treat: today is the first installment of an interview with Bruce Strom. Strom directs the organization Gospel Justice Initiative and is the author of the book Gospel Justice. I met Bruce after writing Grace Sticks and in particular, a chapter on worship (“Honk if you love Jesus. Text if you…

Yes, any implicit self-comparisons to Martin Luther King Jr. stop with the headline. But seriously, last week I went to jail. Not for a civil rights protest, and no, not for being a great sinner, although I’ve had plenty of great sinning days, too. I went to jail to visit a woman who is there…

The longer I live, the more I’m learning the importance of celebrating the people whose lives have touched mine—not just after they die, but when they are still alive. “Emilia Pavlovna” (as she’s been called since I sat in her first-year Russian class during my freshman year of college more than 20 years ago) is…

“Debbie Downer” may be fictional; but we’ve all been around people who bring us down; some days those people may even be our own selves. Thankfully, we don’t have to let the Debbies crash the party, and when personified, we can even laugh at them. This blast-from-the-past Saturday Night Live sketch comes with the hope…

This intersection is a place where hopefully you and I both can come and reflect, vent, ask questions and share doubts and experiences without judgement. It’s also a place where you get to be a bit of a guinea pig: rough drafts of passages that will appear in future books of mine tend to make…

On this day once a year when we exchange treakly Hallmark card greetings with our loved ones, it may be salutary to remember here at this intersection between life and God who the original St. Valentine was. Valentine was a Christian pastor in third-century Rome. When the then Roman emperor Claudius issued an edict prohibiting…

It’s always amusing to discover which of my previous posts have been shared the most in the blogosphere. With 399 shares, “Flirt to Convert” is one of them. And it seems that posts relating in some way to love, marriage, sex and gender are largely the most popular among my fellow saints and sinners. With…

This past weekend we took the kids to a free concert for families at Emory’s Carlos Museum. The Vega String Quartet performed a series of bedtime pieces in their pajamas, surrounded by an audience of young children also in their PJ’s. Dinosaur PJ’s. Superman PJ’s. Princess PJ’s. Spongebob PJ’s. Oh, and hot chocolate with marshmallows…

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