grace Archives | Philip Yancey

Now More Than Ever

Philip Yancey — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 03:14:35 +0000

I wrote What’s So Amazing About Grace? more than twenty-five years ago, at the close of the twentieth century. I feared that some parts of the church were growing so shrill and divisive that bystanders no longer heard the gospel as good news. In fact, I submitted the book to my publisher with the proposed ... Read more

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Lunch with Bono and U2

Philip Yancey — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 07:09:37 +0000

I’m staring at a computer screen in my Colorado office one fine fall day in 2001 when the phone rings. “Hello, my name is Jack Heaslip,” says a voice with a foreign accent. “The boys in the band call me Father Jack, and I’m their chaplain.” He proceeds to tell me his role in helping ... Read more

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Getting Along

Philip Yancey — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 10:42:49 +0000

Grace gets put to the test when we find ourselves confronted with people who are different from us. Do we welcome them and treat them with respect? I think of the people attracted to Jesus: “heretics” (Samaritans), foreigners (a Roman officer), outcasts (prostitutes, tax collectors, the ritually unclean, those with leprosy). Remarkably, Jesus found a ... Read more

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Walking with Mental Illness

Philip Yancey — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 02:20:07 +0000

(This month’s guest blog offers a unique perspective on mental illness, from a doctor from Northern Ireland who found herself institutionalized as a patient. Writer Sharon Hastings further details her struggles in Wrestling With My Thoughts: A Doctor With Severe Mental Illness Discovers Strength.) The nurse removes a glass nail-polish bottle and the flashlight I ... Read more

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Aging Grace-fully

Philip Yancey — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 06:08:55 +0000

My grandmother, born in Atlanta in 1899, was a classic Southern woman of the era, with the singular ambition of rearing a family. She had no checking account, and managed the house on a cash allowance from her husband. She tried driving once, and after steering the car into a ditch never attempted it again. ... Read more

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Unexpected Guest

Philip Yancey — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 06:24:25 +0000

Sitting on the platform as a visiting speaker, I feel as if I have entered a time warp from the late 1950s. I look out on a church sanctuary packed with people dressed in their Sunday finest. These days, pastors where I live in Colorado tend to wear jeans and untucked shirts; here, in a ... Read more

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Fatherless

Philip Yancey — Sun, 18 Jun 2017 05:16:22 +0000

I never thought it strange, not having a father. I was barely a year old when my father died, so I didn’t miss him. How could I? I never knew him. In elementary school some kids didn’t know better than to ask, “How’d he die?” and when I told them polio, my status went up. ... Read more

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You Gotta Start Somewhere

Philip Yancey — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 16:51:35 +0000

I know William Willimon as an outstanding preacher as well as a professor and chaplain at Duke University. In this vignette, he gives an account of two elderly women who made a wrong turn into a sketchy part of town and proceeded to invite a most unlikely guest to their suburban church service. Verleen lived ... Read more

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A Dispenser of Grace

Philip Yancey — Tue, 17 Mar 2015 22:41:24 +0000

In Vanishing Grace I describe people I call grace-dispensers. You don’t have to be a professional, or educated, or especially skilled, to be a good grace-dispenser. A new book by John Ortberg, the pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in California, tells of an ordinary woman in San Francisco who makes an extraordinary dispenser of ... Read more

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Words Sacred and Profane

Philip Yancey — Thu, 19 Feb 2015 18:04:35 +0000

My latest book, Vanishing Grace, explores how Christians relate to the broader culture, which got me thinking about how words flow back and forth in a linguistic exchange between the sacred and the profane. (I am using profane in its original meaning of nonreligious—the word comes from Latin, “outside the temple”—not in its modern sense ... Read more

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