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Blog Posts

Ocean Summer

I’ve been dredging my life for recollections to include in a memoir, which will come out in October with the title Where the Light Fell. Here’s a memory from one of the annual trips my family in Atlanta made to visit relatives in Philadelphia. I was ten years old at the time. One summer, to give us relief from Philadelphia’s heat, Mother drives us to Ocean City, New Jersey—“America’s favorite family resort,” the billboards proclaim. She feels safe there because ...

In the Air Again

After staying home virtually all of 2020, in the Spring of this year I started traveling again. In May I ventured an international trip, accepting an invitation to speak at a Europe Teen Challenge conference in Portugal. At the airline gate, twenty minutes before departure, I learned that my COVID-19 antigen test, required for travel, was valid for my connection through Germany but not for entering Portugal. United Airlines pulled my suitcase off the plane, issued me a hotel voucher ...

The World Outside My Window

For years I worked out of a basement apartment in Chicago, with a window view of the sidewalk outside. I saw the knees of people walking by, along with a glimpse of the occasional squirrel, pigeon, or rat. When I moved to Colorado, the view out my basement office improved dramatically. On the very first day, inquisitive foxes stopped by to check out the two-legged newcomers, with a boldness that astonished me. I later heard that a resident down the canyon had ...

My Untold Story

For as long as I’ve been writing, I have wanted to produce a memoir. I’ve read great memoirs on other religious groups: Frank McCourt’s account of Irish Catholics in Angela’s Ashes, Chaim Potok’s memoir-like novels on Orthodox Judaism, Tara Westover’s bestseller Educated about fundamentalist Mormons. Yet my own tribe of evangelical/fundamentalists, hardly a fringe group, is often misunderstood and portrayed by the media in ways that seem tone deaf. Scholars of religion estimate that 90 to 100 million people in ...

A Time to Weep

Some days—September 11, December 7—forever stain our mental calendars, and this year March 11 joined those “days of infamy.” The date marked not only the one-year anniversary of COVID-19 being declared a pandemic but also the tenth anniversary of a tsunami that devastated a coastal region of Japan. The tsunami surge did its damage quickly and receded; the pandemic surge is still wreaking havoc across the globe. The 2011 tsunami ranks as the most expensive natural disaster in history. Japan ...