Yesterday Chuck Morse of IRN USA News interviewed me on the radio. (You can listen to that conversation here.) Actually the segment was really more of a conversation with Chuck and his producer-partner Andre Traversa about mega church pastor Rick Warren’s Daniel Plan diet initiative. The Daniel Plan has been going strong: supposedly more than…

Today when we remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was both a deeply flawed and greatly inspired public servant and man of God, I am struck by this recollection of King from this morning’s Our Daily Bread devotional: In a sermon in early 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. quoted Jesus’ words from Mark 10…

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard both men and women in the church say—about women in leadership or women’s ordination issues—something to the effect of,  “It’s just impossible to ignore certain Scripture passages” (the “certain Scripture passages” being taken to mean a blanket rejection of women in leadership by the apostle Paul).…

I’m always interested in learning more about the people I write for….Which is why I was intrigued to read that the January 8 issue of The Christian Century calls a moratorium on woe-to-the-millennials talk. In his opening column, CC editor John Buchanan argues that the young adults he knows—contrary to studies depicting them as selfish,…

At the start of a new year, I find myself going back through old posts and thinking about new ideas for reflection, conversation or rants—which is how I stumbled upon this post this morning about Christian code words. By code words, I mean those expressions that claim to mean one thing when they really mean…

This week’s musical mental health break goes out to a friend whose husband is addicted to porn and has been for years. She loves him. He loves her. And yet there is much to thwart that love in a world in which the objectification of women (and men to a lesser degree), the commodification of…

One of the gifts of Christmas family reunions (that, with the size and spread of a very large extended family only happen every ten years or so) is meeting a long-lost relative who you can get to know a bit and fall in love with. My aunt Sally raised six children without killing herself, used…

TIME magazine’s pronouncement of Pope Francis as “Person of the Year,” coming as it does after yesterday’s memorial service for Nelson Mandela, has sparked some thoughts on the making of these two great persons.  What unites them? A surprising number of things, maybe, but one quality in particular stands out. Humility, in a willingness to…

Yesterday fellow saint and sinner Michael sent along this wonderful clip by Rob Bell. I watched it this morning and found myself nodding to the music. For restless souls looking for more meaning, more truth and more life, the piece is a rich reflection on who God in Jesus is, as Truth, Justice, Love, and…

It’s not every day that you get to sit down at tea time with His Holiness. But that’s precisely what happened a couple weeks ago for the prominent Italian journalist and atheist Eugenio Scalfari. An unexpected phone call from the most powerful figure in Western Christianity today, Pope Francis, became an intimate, in-person chat and…

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