Blog | Page 21 of 40 | Philip Yancey

A View from Abroad

May 2017

If you feel discouraged about the church in the U.S.—or the state of the nation itself, for that matter—I recommend traveling abroad. I just returned from two countries that share a common border, Bulgaria and Greece, and both make our own problems seem small by contrast. Bulgaria may hold the world record for bad luck in foreign policy. For five hundred years it did not even exist as an independent country, ruled instead by Turks of the Ottoman Empire. Freed ...

Now You See Him…

April 2017

Have you ever wondered what Jesus was doing between the first Easter Sunday and his ascension six weeks later? The New Testament records ten appearances, half of them occurring on the same day, and all together occupying only a few hours of his time. What else was taking place? Free of his former body’s constraints, was Jesus paying unrecorded visits to other cultures on earth, or zipping in and out of time warps and wormholes to check on other universes? ...

Banished to Paradise

March 2017

Janet and I spent last week in Hawaii. After attending a conference in Honolulu, we opted to spend our free time not at a beach resort but rather on the small, sparsely developed island of Molokai. There, we hiked the Kalaupapa trail, a vertiginous descent that negotiates 26 switchbacks in three miles, the only land route to Hawaii’s historic leprosy colony. Before statehood, the kingdom of Hawaii tore leprosy patients from their homes and shipped them to Kalaupapa, a peninsula ...

Grace in Silence

February 2017

For almost thirty years, one book has obsessed the movie director Martin Scorsese: Silence, the celebrated novel by Japanese author Shusaku Endo. Now, in a lavish $40 million production, Scorsese’s cherished project has come to fruition. I wrote about Endo’s novel in my book Soul Survivor, and I admit to misgivings about how Endo’s classic work might be treated by the director of such films as Taxi Driver, Gangs of New York, Goodfellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, and The Wolf of ...

Election Reflections: Bridging the Gap

January 2017

In its Person of the Year cover story, Time magazine gave Donald Trump the title “President of the Divided States of America.” With good reason. A glance at the electoral map shows solid blue on the west and northeast coasts and, in between, a huge swath of red extending across all but five states. Although Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a healthy margin, Trump won 2,623 counties to Clinton’s 489. The modern United States pits the coasts against ...

Blog Posts

A View from Abroad

Now You See Him…

Banished to Paradise

Grace in Silence

Election Reflections: Bridging the Gap