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Blog Posts

After the Protests and Riots, What?

In Minneapolis, rioters protesting the killing of George Floyd damaged more than 570 buildings and burned 67 businesses to the ground, many of them minority-owned.  In my city of Denver, rioters targeted a pedestrian mall near the state capitol, as well as museums and the public library, smashing windows, defacing statues, and spray-painting graffiti. I’m old enough to remember similar scenes from my former city, Chicago.  A band of young radicals known as the Weathermen joined with Black Panthers and ...

Praying All the Way to the Bank

As the statistics on illness and death due to COVID-19 keep rising, the economic statistics keep falling. In March the stock market lost more than $11 trillion in value, and has been yo-yoing ever since. While the more fortunate are mourning their dwindling retirement plans, the truly desperate have joined the 36 million Americans applying for unemployment benefits.  How will they pay the rent or feed their families? While watching the news one day, I flashed back to another time ...

Passover, Easter, and COVID-19

On Wednesday and Thursday nights last week, as Jews gathered in some virtual way around the Seder feast, they asked, “How is this night different from all other nights?”  Christians would do well to reflect similarly.  The Jewish celebration of Passover and the Christian celebration of Holy Week overlapped this year.  Both traditions recall dark nights from long ago when desperate people of faith gathered to face a scary future.  Both, however, are overshadowed by a global threat from a ...

Living in Plague Times

It’s my own fault.  Because I’ve written books with titles like Where Is God When It Hurts, Disappointment with God, and The Question That Never Goes Away, my phone starts ringing when there’s a mass shooting, a tsunami…or a rogue virus that spreads across the world.  Would I please comment on this radio show, or that podcast?  I’ve done little else this frightful week, as a tiny virus from the other side of the world has brought modern civilization to ...

The Power of Love and the Love of Power (Shakespeare: Part II)

William Shakespeare knew love, and also its complications.  At the age of eighteen he married Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years his senior.  Six months after the wedding, Anne gave birth to a child, which no doubt sparked local gossip.  Later, he wrote love sonnets to a man—Was the playwright a closet homosexual?—and then composed 26 sonnets to a married woman known only as the Dark Lady. His plays give words to the stirrings that every romantic feels.  In Love’s ...