Philip Yancey's featured book Where The Light Fell: A Memoir is available here: See purchase options!

Blog Posts

A Cry of Grief

That first day, I awoke at sunrise in their basement guest quarters. Soft morning light filtered through the trees as cheery birds announced the new day. I opened a book I had brought along for a Zoom book group: In This World of Wonders, by Nicholas Wolterstorff, a renowned Christian philosopher who had taught at Calvin College, Yale University, and the Free University of Amsterdam. After writing many acclaimed works of philosophy, a few years ago Wolterstorff published this personal ...

Sharpening the Faith Angle

Ask a New York- or D.C.-based journalist what they know about evangelical Christians and you may well get an answer like, “They’re the ones who voted for Donald Trump.” The typical reporter tends to view society through a political lens and has little exposure to religion. Carl Cannon, Editor of the news website RealClearPolitics, acknowledges the problem. “I was practically born and raised in the news business, and know firsthand that newsrooms are exceedingly secular places,” he says. “But the ...

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Jimmy Carter

Generations who read about Carter only in history books may miss the drama of his meteoric rise to the presidency. He grew up in rural Georgia, in a home without indoor plumbing or electricity, and walked three miles to school and back. His family could have been scripted by Hollywood: his mother did a stint with the Peace Corps in India and his sister Ruth had some renown as a faith healer. And then there was Billy, who hung out ...

Dislabeled

My memoir, Where the Light Fell, tells the saga of my older brother, in whose shadow I grew up. Marshall was blessed with an off-the-charts IQ and preternatural musical gifts, including absolute pitch and an auditory memory that enabled him to play any music he’d ever heard. Everything changed in 2009 when a stroke cut off blood flow to his brain. One day he was playing golf; two days later he lay in an ICU ward, comatose. Only a rare ...

Faith, Deconstructed or Reconstructed

This blog is different from any of my others. It reproduces an exchange of emails I had with Bart Campolo about my memoir, Where the Light Fell.  Bart, son of the Baptist speaker and writer Tony Campolo, grew up in the heart of the evangelical subculture. He worked as an urban missionary and co-founded Mission Year, a year-long program in which Christian young people live in urban neighborhoods and find practical ways to love their neighbors. Ultimately, however, Bart declared ...