Blog | Page 20 of 40 | Philip Yancey

Pakistan’s Mother Teresa

October 2017

I have been working on an update and revision of two books I wrote with Dr. Paul Brand, a world-renowned leprosy expert who died in 2003. Dr. Brand influenced me more than any other person, and we spent most of a decade collaborating on writing projects. Last week I came across this memory from his life: In the 1950s I visited a nun, Dr. Ruth Pfau, outside of Karachi, Pakistan, amid the worst human squalor I have ever encountered. As ...

The World Before Us

September 2017

I spent ten days this month in Alaska, at a writing conference sponsored by the author Leslie Leyland Fields. From a small private island just off the large island of Kodiak, Leslie and her family run a commercial fishing operation. The twenty of us who flew in from “the lower 48” had to adapt to the wilderness setting: outhouses, no hot water, no cell phone service, and a limit of ten minutes per day on the Internet (yes!). By its ...

A Tale of Two Families

August 2017

In the process of writing a memoir, I have been reflecting on the families of two sisters. The first, Joyce, ruled with the iron hand of legalism. Her five kids obeyed a lengthy set of strict rules—“Because I say so, that’s why!” Now grown, they tell me they acquiesced mainly out of fear of punishment. Joyce’s family devotions often centered on the Old Testament: Honor your parents, Fear the Lord, Stop grumbling. The word grace rarely came up. When her ...

Reading Wars

July 2017

I am going through a personal crisis. I used to love reading. I am writing this blog in my office, surrounded by 27 tall bookcases laden with some 5,000 books. Over the years I have read them, marked them up, and recorded the annotations in a computer database for potential references in my writing. To a large degree, they have formed my professional and spiritual life. Books help define who I am. They have ushered me on a journey of ...

Fatherless

June 2017

I never thought it strange, not having a father. I was barely a year old when my father died, so I didn’t miss him. How could I? I never knew him. In elementary school some kids didn’t know better than to ask, “How’d he die?” and when I told them polio, my status went up. Bubonic plague or suicide wouldn’t have had more effect. On the walls of every school hung March of Dimes posters of children wearing metal braces ...

Blog Posts

Pakistan’s Mother Teresa

The World Before Us

A Tale of Two Families

Reading Wars

Fatherless