My next-door neighbor, in addition to being a photographer, is a fire dancer: she gets paid to perform well-choreographed tricks with hot flames while wearing sexy outfits.  Yesterday several other parents and I were at her house to celebrate her son’s third birthday when another mother stumbled upon a set of books.  They weren’t just…

Probably most of us know commentator, author and actor Ben Stein from his taking attendance in the 1986 movie, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”  Here Stein, a God-fearing Jew, shares his views on the merits of Christmas and why at this time of the year we do well to reconsider faith in God (or lack thereof)…

“I want Jesus!,” my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter exclaimed the other day, as she grasped for the ceramic baby Jesus in the nativity scene on our kitchen table. These days when advertisers prostitute themselves for our dollars and every manner of holiday festivity competes for our time, my daughter’s un-self-conscious exclamation reminds me of what I really…

Much has been written about ministry and sex, sexuality, gender and, of most immediate and grave importance here, what to wear when you find yourself young, female and in ordained ministry.  The question has been so well-traversed that it can be tiresome. Those of us who find ourselves “in the business” know the familiar line,…

When gay singer George Michael recently put off his tour because of a bad case of pneumonia that landed him in the intensive care unit at the hospital and drew family and long-time partner Fadi Fawaz to his sick bed, members of the group, “Christians for a Moral America,” reportedly prayed for Michael to die…

“Foxes have their dens and the birds in the air have their nests.  But the son of man has nowhere he can lay his head.”  Matthew 8:20 “Black Friday” has come and gone, but the staggering figures remain.  Americans spent a whopping $11.4 billion, averaging $400 per consumer- the most ever spent on a single…

“How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!…It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”  Mark 10:23, 24 The rich, young man’s story is one many of us have heard many times…

The first-ever animal to orbit the Earth and to die in space was a dog named “Laika” (Russian for “Barker”).  When the Soviets launched Sputnik 2 in 1957, Laika out-performed two other dogs to earn the dubious honor of participating in this experiment on the impact of spaceflight on living creatures. Laika’s reward was a…

Al Franken was more creative than I am this morning.  Besides, the “gospel” in certain politicans’ rhetoric about how to fix America’s unemployment crisis really does resemble this sometimes:  Like the other day when Rick Perry told the New York Times that he “doesn’t care” that his tax proposal, (which would dramatically lower taxes on…

These days my denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), finds itself bracing for the possibility of further membership losses with more congregations jumping ship- this after a majority of presbyteries voted to remove the constitutional requirement that all ministers, elders and deacons  live “in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or…

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