Inspiration Faith & Prayer Health & Wellness Entertainment Love & Family
Newsletters Special Offers

This week’s musical mental health break comes from the world of folk rock where I stumbled into Parker Millsap and his “Truckstop Gospel,” thanks to a segment on NPR yesterday. Parker Millsap is only 20 but has the voice of an old soul; and his “Truckstop Gospel” plays on the ambiguities of American evangelical Christian…

[NOTE: This is a revised version of an earlier post.] The other day I did my first author reading at our local library. Only two people showed up, which was great, a) because it meant we were able to have a deeper conversation about all sorts of things, from reincarnation to the nature of Christian…

One thing that keeps me showing up at this intersection between God and life is you and your musings. I hope you’ll keep leaving them here. Here is what some of you have been saying… Saint and sinner Briana from Wheaton, IL had this to say in response to Centuries of Institutional Church Chauvinism…Based on…

Today when we remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was both a deeply flawed and greatly inspired public servant and man of God, I am struck by this recollection of King from this morning’s Our Daily Bread devotional: In a sermon in early 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. quoted Jesus’ words from Mark 10…

TIME magazine’s pronouncement of Pope Francis as “Person of the Year,” coming as it does after yesterday’s memorial service for Nelson Mandela, has sparked some thoughts on the making of these two great persons.  What unites them? A surprising number of things, maybe, but one quality in particular stands out. Humility, in a willingness to…

It’s not every day that you get to sit down at tea time with His Holiness. But that’s precisely what happened a couple weeks ago for the prominent Italian journalist and atheist Eugenio Scalfari. An unexpected phone call from the most powerful figure in Western Christianity today, Pope Francis, became an intimate, in-person chat and…

How does one tell a history of silence? After all, silence encapsulates everything not said—the elisions and the possibilities, the inchoate, unexplored universe beyond the hard limits of our language. Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch’s latest book Silence: A Christian History achieves this feat; and silence, as what might easily be construed as the “underside” of…

It’s been too long. I’m sorry. Life has been, well, too fast-paced lately—and will remain so until mid November. But I’ve missed you. This week, I’ve been reflecting on gratitude and silence. First, gratitude: The other night my son asked to sit at the head of the table over dinner (usually a position allocated for…

Maybe it’s because at 2 am last night my daughter woke me up and never went back to sleep. Or because at 2:05 am we discovered a bat flying around in the upstairs bedroom, having rather mysteriously snuck in from some where. (As I write this, the bat is still flying around in the upstairs…

Religion Today recently posted the results of a survey of Americans’ understanding of the term, “religious.” Apparently the old divide between those who define religiosity based solely on faith and beliefs (historically Protestants) and those who take the concept to mean primarily a person’s good works (historically Catholics) persists. The survey, carried out by the…
archives most recent
search this blog
More from Beliefnet and our partners
More from Beliefnet and our partners