Blog Posts

This weekend I am speaking at the dedication of a research center on the campus of Barry University named in honor of Drs. Paul and Margaret Brand.  I wrote three books with Paul Brand in the 1980s (Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, In His Image, and The Gift of Pain) and no one has influenced me more.  Paul Brand died in 2003 but Margaret, now in her nineties, spryly carries on an active life of violin-playing, lecturing, and great-grandmothering. For a ...

Brennan Manning has written a memoir titled All Is Grace that will be published this year by David C. Cook Publishing.  I wrote the Foreword, and include excerpts here about my friend. I first met Brennan Manning at an event called Greenbelt Festival in England, a sort of Christian Woodstock of artists, musicians and speakers that had attracted twenty thousand fans to tents and impromptu venues set up in the muddy infield of a horse-racing track.  Brennan seemed dazzled by ...

I went to prison last Monday: the maximum security unit of Folsom Prison, the California institution made famous by a visit from Johnny Cash, who gave a concert there in 1968.  “We arranged a limo for you,” said my host Jim Carlson who met me at the gate, then laughingly escorted my wife and me to the most beat-up, bedraggled van I have ever seen.  “You’ve heard of California’s budget cutbacks, right?” Jim explained. Three times we had to exit ...

Last weekend was the fourth anniversary of the rollover accident which I describe in the first chapter of What Good Is God? Appropriately, we spent it with some wonderful friends from the church in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where I spoke on Prayer the day before my Ford Explorer slipped off an icy road and tumbled over and over down an embankment. February 25, 2007, was the longest day of my life.  In all I spent seven hours strapped to ...