Blog Archives | Philip Yancey

The Universe and My Aquarium

December 2025

Some forty years ago, when I lived in downtown Chicago, I wrote this reflection on my aquarium. It became a kind of parable with special significance in the Christmas season. A shorter version made its way into one of my books; here is the original. When I look out my downtown window I see a twelve-story apartment building, all concrete and glass, its balconies speckled by a random assortment of bicycles, Weber grills and lawn chairs. Closer, I see twisted ...

Alpha and Omega

November 2025

We published no blog last month due to the untimely death of Joannie Barth, who coordinated my social media for 13 years. We are still bereft. This month, a pastor reflects on encounters with both the beginning and the end of life on the same day. My newest grandchild emerged from the darkness of the womb on the third day of August, which fell on a Sunday. The people of my congregation gathered to share the journey of life, to ...

Learning to Write

September 2025

I’ve recently begun a book about writing. Now and then I’ll include a brief excerpt from this work in progress as a blog post. These days, everybody is a writer. Several billion of us connect daily through a variety of social media platforms and email programs. For the first time in history, something you write today may, against all odds, go viral, filling your inbox with messages from faraway places such as Kazakhstan or Paraguay. Once a respected profession, writing ...

Miracle on the River Kwai

August 2025

The classic movie starring Alec Guinness, The Bridge on the River Kwai, depicts life in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. This 1957 movie was fictional, but the more recent movie To End All Wars tells the true story of Ernest Gordon, a British Army captain captured at sea by the Japanese at the age of twenty-four. Gordon was sent to work on a railway line which the Japanese were building through the dense Thai jungle. For labor, ...

Word Play

July 2025

Visitors to my Facebook page and website have proved that they love words. Here’s a test: Do you know what an eponym is? Homonyms are words with more than one meaning, such as rock, or fall. Synonyms mean nearly the same thing as another word, while antonyms mean the opposite. Acronyms combine the initial letters of a group of words to form a new word: NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) or laser (from light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation—sure, ...