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

Melancholy Angels

In my years of writing, I’ve not paid much attention to angels. I’ve never knowingly encountered one — knowingly, I say, for how could I tell for certain? Supernatural go-betweens, angels operate in the invisible world, rarely revealing themselves to those of us who occupy the material world. I think of angels as something like the dark matter that physicists are still trying to understand.  Our familiar world of matter—the Earth, stars and planets, everything that we can see—represents only ...

Emerging from the Dark

During Soviet days the authorities arrested and imprisoned my father, a pastor.  He was sentenced to be executed, but Russia was constructing something above the Arctic Circle, so Stalin sent him and other prisoners up there to work in the cold.  When he returned home, aged and sick, after 19 years, he learned that his wife and two sons had died.  So he remarried and started a new family—my family.  My father was 54 years old when I was born. ...

Farewell, Eugene

This week I lost a friend, and the world lost one of God’s favorites: Eugene Peterson. Other blogs and websites are reporting on his achievements as a pastor, professor, and author.  Rather than repeat the many well-deserved eulogies in his honor, I decided to reflect on a few snapshots that show his more human side. The Message. Eugene first rewrote the book of Galatians for his local church, the genesis of what would become a 12-year-long undertaking to render the original ...

Big Screen, Little Screen

This week I leave for a trip to Ukraine, Belarus, and Hungary.  My first stop, Ukraine, brings to mind memories of the stirring Orange Revolution that occurred there in 2004.  In one of my books, What Good Is God, I told the little-known story of an unlikely hero who helped spark that revolution. Like other members of the Soviet Union, Ukraine moved toward democracy as the Soviet empire collapsed, though in Ukraine democracy advanced at a glacial pace.  If you think ...

Are You Happy?

Each year the UN rates the happiest places in the world, based on such factors as freedom, generosity, lack of corruption, healthy life expectancy, and social support. Scandinavian countries usually score high: Finland currently ranks as the happiest country, followed by Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. Very poor countries and war zones such as Yemen and Syria score the lowest. The United States, which ranks 18th of the 156 countries surveyed, has been trending downward for a decade. Although the “pursuit ...