If we see more and further than they, it is not because of our own clear eyes or tall bodies, but because we are raised on high by their gigantic stature.
Have you ever heard of the Greatest Books of the Western World collection? Published by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1954, this comprehensive series was edited by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer J. A...
Culture is like gravity. We never talk about it, except in physics classes. We don’t include gravity in our weekly planning processes. No one gets up thinking about how gravity will affect their day. ...
Leviticus 25:10-17, Deuteronomy 15:7-11, Amos 5:11-15, James 82:, Luke 4:18-19
There is no social evil, no form of injustice whether of the feudal or the capitalist order which has not been sanctified in some way or other by religious sentiment and thereby rendered more impervio...
A people can be judged as better or worse according to what they love, and their nation can be assessed as healthy or unhealthy according to the condition of what they love.
The most powerful choices we will make in our lives are not about specific decisions but about patterns of life: the nudges and disciplines that will shape all our other choices. This is especially tr...
To frame is to put a language boundary around our experience. It is to name what happens in particular ways, to say how we see the world, and to see the world how we say it is. Framing includes tellin...
Leviticus 25:23, Deuteronomy 8:7-10, Micah 7:8, Psalm 82:3, James 2:14-17
When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.” For more,...
People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all themselves. But in fact they are invariably the benefici...
Whether the Hebrew Genesis account was meant to be science or not, it was certainly meant to convey statements of faith. As will be shown it is part of the biblical polemic against paganism and an int...
G. K. Chesterton was well-known (and iconoclastic) in his defense of tradition in a time when progress was all the rage in Western Europe- in technology, in the sciences, in philosophy. Chesterton, on...
The bottom line is this: never grow complacent. Never grow tired of learning. As soon as we stop learning we lose the capacity to grow and mature in our work and our relationships. This continual lear...
There’s a quote by H. Richard Niebuhr that I believe is absolutely true. “The great Christian revolutions,” he argued, “come not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen w...
[A] rock-star preaches capitalism. Wow. Sometimes I hear myself and I just can’t believe it. But commerce is real. . . . Aid is just a stopgap. Commerce—entrepreneurial capitalism—takes more people ou...
Before my mentor, Dallas Willard, passed over to glory, I asked him what he thought about the rapid rise of the Christian spiritual formation movement. He said, “It is a wonderful thing, but my fear i...
As popularized in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s fascinating book by the same name, nudges are small changes in the environment around us that make it easier for us to make the choices we want to ...
James 2:1-9, Leviticus 19:15, Deuteronomy 1:17, Romans 2:1-11
When I went to seminary to prepare for the ministry, I met an African-American student, Elward Ellis, who befriended both my future wife, Kathy Kristy, and me. He gave us gracious but bare-knuckled me...
The family has long been a haven in a heartless world, the one place immune to market forces and economic calculations, where the personal, the private, and the emotional hold sway. Yet. . . that is ...
If we accept Genesis 1 as ancient cosmology, then we need to interpret it as ancient cosmology rather than translate it into modern cosmology. If we try to turn it into modern cosmology, we are making...
Mark 7:1-23, Mark 7:1-12, Isaiah 29:13, Exodus 12:6-20, Deuteronomy 6:20-25, Joshua 4:1-9
Context Ritual Purity The most important broad contextual issue to address with this passage is the concept of ritual purity, and the ways in which this served as a boundary and identity marker for ...
Deuteronomy 30:19-20, Joshua 24:15, Matthew 6:24, Luke 10:41-42, Matthew 7:13-14 , Psalm 16:11
I had a memorable lunch a few years ago with my friends Mike and Claudia, who had recently returned from Malawi, a small country in southeastern Africa. We were sitting in a booth at one of those chai...
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23, Mark 7:11-12, Isaiah 29:13, Exodus 12:6-20, Deuteronomy 6:20-25, Joshua 4:1-9
Context Ritual Purity The most important broad contextual issue to address with this passage is the concept of ritual purity, and the ways in which this served as a boundary and identity marker for ...
Your decisions . . . along with your responses to other people’s decisions, which are also your decisions...are about the only thing you can control in life, which means your decisions are how you con...
If there is one word that sums up how many of us feel about technology and family life, it’s Help! Parents know we need help. We love the way devices make our lives easier amid the stress and busy...
The Hebrew cosmology represents a revolutionary break with the contemporary world, a parting of the spiritual ways that involved the undermining of the entire prevailing mythological world-view... The...
For years, Bible scholars have danced around the matter by saying slavery in Rome was far different from slavery in the first few centuries of American history. No doubt their observations carry a mea...
Deuteronomy 6:6-7, Proverbs 22:6, 1 Samuel 1:27-28, Luke 2:51-52, Ephesians 6:1-4, Psalm 127:3-5
I want to suggest a pretty radical idea about what family is for. Family is about the forming of persons. Being a person is a gift, like life itself—we are born as human beings made in the image of Go...
Exodus 18:13-27 , 1 Kings 19:1-9 , Deuteronomy 5:12-15 , Mark 6:30-32, Matthew 11:28-30, Psalm 23:1-3
Dangerous levels of exhaustion usually accumulate over a longer period of time in which we are consistently living beyond human limits, functioning outside our giftedness, or not paying attention to t...
Overall, from a biblical perspective, the sustained fertility and habitability of the earth, or more particularly of the land of Israel, is the best index of the health of the covenant relationship. W...