Blog Posts

The same week that saw the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, I found myself in a studio taping the Tavis Smiley show, an interview program produced for PBS television.  The program ranges widely over various topics, with an emphasis on politics and an occasional splash of religion.  Having grown up Pentecostal, Tavis is not reluctant to talk about God.  I was invited to discuss my book The Question That Never Goes Away for a segment that airs, fittingly, ...

Last November the strongest typhoon ever recorded slammed into the southern islands of the Philippines, with winds reaching 195 miles per hour.  The storm caused more than 6,000 deaths (a thousand people are still missing) and 27,000 injuries, many of them bone fractures caused by collapsing buildings and flying debris. Hurricanes and typhoons, earthquakes, violence in Syria and Nigeria, a missing Malaysian airplane, wildfires, floods, droughts—the tragedies keep on coming, relentlessly.  And wherever they occur a volunteer army from private ...

I went back through the blogs I wrote in 2013 to see which ones generated enough interest for readers to click through.  If you missed some of these and they pique your interest, you can click on them for the original. Here’s the Top Ten list: 1. Farewell Brennan (remembering the writer and priest Brennan Manning) 2. Why Do They Hate Us? (reflections on the Boston Marathon bombing) 3. Fragile Beauty (a celebration of frost flowers, a rare natural phenomenon) ...

As I look back on the pile of books I read in 2013, a number of them seem to fall into a new genre.  “Christian hip,” I’ll call it.  Move over John Stott, Chuck Colson, and Max Lucado.  These books circle around faith matters in a decidedly non-traditional way.  Many of the authors came out of a strict evangelical or fundamentalist background, and they write about their spiritual detours in a loose, memoir-type style with a few obligatory bad words ...