Blog | Page 17 of 40 | Philip Yancey

Statistical Love

February 2019

I recently listened to a speech by Peter Singer, the world’s most influential living philosopher, according to The New Yorker. Much of our compassion and charity is misguided, Singer argued. We should be focusing on how to do the most good for the most people. As an example, Singer mentioned the noble cause of providing seeing-eye dogs for the blind. It takes $40,000 to train the dog and the recipient, whereas a treatment costing just fifty dollars would cure a ...

Aging Grace-fully

January 2019

My grandmother, born in Atlanta in 1899, was a classic Southern woman of the era, with the singular ambition of rearing a family. She had no checking account, and managed the house on a cash allowance from her husband. She tried driving once, and after steering the car into a ditch never attempted it again. I picture Carrie Ware, my grandmother, as I knew her in my childhood: a short woman with graying hair and a pale complexion, slightly bow-legged, ...

Melancholy Angels

December 2018

In my years of writing, I’ve not paid much attention to angels. I’ve never knowingly encountered one — knowingly, I say, for how could I tell for certain? Supernatural go-betweens, angels operate in the invisible world, rarely revealing themselves to those of us who occupy the material world. I think of angels as something like the dark matter that physicists are still trying to understand. Our familiar world of matter—the Earth, stars and planets, everything that we can see—represents only ...

Emerging from the Dark

November 2018

During Soviet days the authorities arrested and imprisoned my father, a pastor. He was sentenced to be executed, but Russia was constructing something above the Arctic Circle, so Stalin sent him and other prisoners up there to work in the cold. When he returned home, aged and sick, after 19 years, he learned that his wife and two sons had died. So he remarried and started a new family—my family. My father was 54 years old when I was born. ...

Farewell, Eugene

October 2018

This week I lost a friend, and the world lost one of God’s favorites: Eugene Peterson. Other blogs and websites are reporting on his achievements as a pastor, professor, and author. Rather than repeat the many well-deserved eulogies in his honor, I decided to reflect on a few snapshots that show his more human side. The Message. Eugene first rewrote the book of Galatians for his local church, the genesis of what would become a 12-year-long undertaking to render the original ...

Blog Posts

Statistical Love

Aging Grace-fully

Melancholy Angels

Emerging from the Dark

Farewell, Eugene