The ten most popular Christmas carols include Silent Night, Away in the Manger, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, The First Noel, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear … but alas, Once in Royal David’s City only clocks in at #14. Here are a couple of...
There is a story told about the great country music guitarist, Chet Atkins (1924-2001). One day, Atkins was in a recording session with several inexperienced musicians who struggled to keep up with his genius and creativity. Exhausted and exasperated, one of them finally blurted out,...
The young man had done everything right. He kept the commandments, lived honorably, and when he encountered Jesus, he asked the best possible question: "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Yet when Jesus answered—"Sell what you have, give to the poor, and follow...
In her remarkable poem Obligations 2, Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier invites us to travel down a path of our choosing. It’s notable how each line of the poem draws us down the page, from reaction through action, into the rawness of grief, then finally...
That was the title of a recent column by Bret Stephens. He was talking about the political sphere and how protectionism, America First agendas, and antisemitism, among others, stalk like “moral and intellectual zombies” through our debates about government. But it also seems like an...
Forty years ago, one of us (we’ll leave it to you to identify her) taught juggling in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. From that experience comes the following counterintuitive lesson: juggling isn't a catching skill, it's a throwing skill. When beginners pick up juggling balls, they...
We promise that we won’t mimic a family member who takes a memorable trip and then insists on spending 2+ hours at Thanksgiving narrating a slide show while the turkey gets seriously over-cooked (of course, that’s just a hypothetical scenario). But … on our recent trip...
The ongoing pain for so many in our culture today has led some to adapt the stock greeting “How are you doing?”/ “I’m fine” into something more honest, more vulnerable, more reflective of the moment. “Frankly, I don’t know how I am doing until I...
Where is the tipping point between doing faithful work on behalf of your church and thinking it all depends on you? Not just you individually, but your whole board? You don’t want to let your fellow congregants down and you certainly don’t want to let...