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Fellowship of Saints and Sinners

It’s been a while since my last “retreat” at the monastery. The last time I was here, I was on deadline to finish the manuscript for my first book Grace Sticks. So I holed myself up in one of these rooms with a cheap bottle of red wine I had snuck in, and over the…

At the risk of beating a dead horse — can anyone help me understand where that awful expression comes from, by the way? — this piece takes a new angle on the whole Ashley Madison scandal. What does an eye-opening dearth of female users on the marital infidelity website reveal about married women who cheat?,…

Within a few hours of its appearance here at this intersection between God and life, my last post on the Ashley Madison scandal had a total of one share. “It must’ve been something I said,” I told my husband later that night, as we were getting into bed. When I checked in yesterday, reader shares…

For those of us saints and sinners who even remotely have been following last week’s Ashley Madison scandal, I can think of at least three lessons it offers (and you may have more, in which case feel free to leave them below): 1. Chances are you will be found out. 37 million Americans with personal…

If you’ve not seen it, you must: John Oliver on “Last Week Tonight” offered the most brilliantly funny rebuke of televangelists and the prosperity gospel I’ve seen to date. Oliver doesn’t mince words, including the four-letter ones, in blasting the moral obscenities of those who specialize in selling the gospel for their own enrichment. Here…

As if ISIS had not already convinced us enough of its total depravity … the latest revelations by The New York Times —(be forewarned, they are disturbing to read) — remind me why I am not a pacifist. As if turning small boys into child soldiers is not enough to raise the ire of the…

Last week school started, demo began on our long overdue home renovation, and we moved into temporary housing in the form of a kind neighbor couple’s guesthouse. Thankfully, through the now endlessly mind-numbing conversations about new kitchen back splash, bathroom fixtures and carpet colors, several volumes of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver’s work on our…

This week Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer admitted to hunting and killing Zimbabwe’s beloved celebrity lion Cecil, the most famous resident of one of Zimbabwe’s national parks and the subject of a decade-long study by Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Unit. Earlier this summer, Palmer reportedly paid two local guides $55,000 for the thrill of baiting then…

When he slipped his feet into the tub of warm, herb-infused water, he did so almost apologetically. “Thank you,” he said, tentatively, an edge of either shyness or embarrassment in his tone as she summoned a foot to her lap. Derek, 46, was a drifter. He had been drifting most of his life like a…

When this video recently went viral, I was rooting for the shark. Not so when it comes to loan sharks, who are one contributor to systemic poverty and sharply growing income inequality in this country. Friend Bruce Strom, whose story we’ve featured here before, and who directs the Gospel Justice Initiative, an organization that equips…
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