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

Fellowship of Saints and Sinners

Yesterday’s pool excursion with my son, Cameron, may have been a big divine hint that I need to do more preparation for Sunday’s small group discussion on the nature of evil.  My son, afterall, unlike me or my esteemed cohorts, is not a self-described cynic, skeptic or religious misfit.  He is just a mostly typical…

Did God help Gabrielle Douglas win?  That was the question posed by Salon writer Mary Elizabeth Williams in a recent piece penned for the magazine and forwarded by fellow saint and sinner Irene Lin.  It’s an interesting question, one that Williams poses with a bit of heartburn:  the “clearly authentic image of a hardworking girl…

Have you been following the story of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot and their so-called “punk prayer protest” against Russian President Vladimir Putin? The band, whose highest-profile members are three young women now facing a three-year prison sentence, has vowed to continue its protests against the Putin regime despite harassment from the Kremlin and…

It’s good to be home! I’ve missed you all, and I’m glad to be back at this intersection between life and God for anyone converted, unconverted or under conversion. Ten serene days of vacation have inspired some reflections this morning on the difference that leaving one’s work, routine and home (for me, these are all…

Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve has been a fun and easy read here at a friend’s ranch in Calistoga, California, where I’m enjoying a few more days of vacation.  Twain wrote it in his later years, and it is a wonderful bit of midrash on the biblical story of creation and the Fall, as well…

This past Sunday I had the joy and privilege of joining in worship with the people of Old First Presbyterian in downtown San Francisco.  The following sermon belongs to our ongoing series, Jesus Epithets:  All the Names Jesus Gets Called in Scripture, and takes as its inspiration John 11:17-27 and Isaiah 65:17-25. When Jesus arrived,…

If you hear less from me over the next ten days, it is because I’ll be mostly vacationing with family and friends first in Albuquerque and San Francisco, and then, sans children, in Napa Valley.  I’m still trying to figure out whether I should even take my lap top.  As much as I love you…

Some of you probably recall that not long ago the Facebook page “Emerging Evangelists” gallery of exclusively male blogging evangelists (excepting a couple brave, smiling wives) elicited an outburst.  What was so “emerging” about an all-male club of evangelists in the 21st century, I wanted to know.  This seemed a bit “neanderthal” if you ask…

The massacre at a movie cinema late Thursday night was a tragedy. It can be a lesson, too.  The question is, a lesson about what exactly?  As usual, the devil is in the details. In the days following a deranged gunman’s diabolical dress-up as the Joker, accompanied by a show-and-tell routine of live ammunition at…

I’m struck this morning by the prescience of yesterday’s poem, coming as it did (without my knowledge at the time of posting it) in the wake of the tragedy that struck  late Thursday night at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado: “Life the hound, Equivocal, Comes at a bound, Either to rend me, Or to befriend me.” Life…comes…
archives most recent
search this blog
More from Beliefnet and our partners