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Preacher's Kid: Honest Faith, Real World

How Evil Are You? The answer for a preacher’s kid, growing up in a fundamentalist/Pentecostal home, was clearcut: All Humanity was broken by sin, its efforts to do “good” transitory, because at the core of our beings was rebellion against a righteous and holy God. In a world of believers and non-believers, we differ on…

On Thursday, northern Utah was hit by a windstorm of historic proportions. Hurricane-force winds, topping 100 miles per hour, shredded the region, toppling semi-trailer rigs, ripping away roofing and tearing trees out by their roots. I got off the train two stops short to walk a few miles in the icy gusts, a mere 50-60…

To be a preacher’s kid in a Fundamentalist Christian/ Pentecostal home in the 1960s and early 1970s was to be engaged in a full-on “culture war,” even decades before that term came to define our nation’s current theological, ethical and political divides. For me, it was music that was the battleground. Back then, the veterans…

Perhaps my perceptions are skewed, but does it seem that as the 2011 holiday season gets underway there is a sense of desperate celebration? Stores opened for Christmas shopping earlier than ever this week, offering margin-cutting bargains to bring the throngs into their aisles, and queuing up at the checkout stands to fork over the…

Far more than a chance to gorge on turkey, stuffing, yams, pies, hams and mashed potatoes and gravy, Thanksgiving is a time for reflection, and the gift of perspective. We tend to look to the so-called “first Thanksgiving” as that 1621 get-together of Pilgrims and Native Americans at Plymouth. Really, though, it was a harvest…

Herman Cain likens himself to a modern-day Moses, a reluctant yet obedient servant who, in this century, answered the call to run for the Republican presidential nomination. Michele Bachmann said God told her to run. Ricky Perry, too, has laid claim to the mantle of Jehovah’s White House preference. Cain, though resolute in his denials…

One of the worst perils of being a preacher’s kid is not what you might think. You know, those tales about misbehaving progeny of men of the cloth; those rebellious, marginalized of-spring yearning to be free . . . of restrictions and expectations. Not that’s there’s a shortage of such P.K.s out there. This preacher’s…

Back in my days as a religion writer for a metro newspaper, I asked some ministers about what I thought was a rather simple question: “If a member of your congregation won a jackpot at a casino, the lottery, or some other gambling payoff and offered part or all of it to your church, would…

In the several churches that my father the preacher pastored, I learned the cure for prejudice the hard way – and as it turned out, that was perhaps the best way. When I was 15, I became enamored of a Japanese girl whose family attended our community church. We became friends, and then she became…

Imagine my surprise to learn that the Ark of the Covenant had been found. I thought Harrison Ford, in his role as Indiana Jones, had done that a long, long time ago. Not so, according to the Grekomania.ru website, supposedly a Russian-based information partner” of the Greek Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The website says…
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