Ecclesiastes

Lamenting a Living Son This is God’s own lament: a brokenhearted father mourning the loss of a still-living son.  Throughout the book, God has led Hosea to draw from moments of Israel’s past.  Here, ...

The Good News or the Bad News? Which do you want first: the good news or the bad news? Well, if you’re preaching Hosea these next two weeks, it doesn’t matter what you want.  You’re getting the bad ...

Preaching Commentary Lamenting a Living Son This is God’s own lament: a brokenhearted father mourning the loss of a still-living son.  Throughout the book, God has led Hosea to draw from moments of...

From the dawn of civilization to 2003, five exabytes of data were created. The same amount was created in the last two days.

Thomas Merton’s words about the Bible in general apply to the Old Testament in particular:  There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible — until we manage to get so used to it that we ...

Mark Twain’s travels through Europe became something of a triumphal tour, with the most distinguished figures on the continent eager to host him. He dined with royalty, intellectuals, and statesmen, h...

Living in a society governed by technique conditions us to believe that in every way life is easier than it ever has been. Technique is the use of rational methods to maximize efficiency, and we...

Now, technology is everywhere. I don’t mean just glowing screens and digital devices; I mean the whole apparatus of “easy everywhere” that has come into existence in just over the span of one human li...

Divine Creator, your ways are above our ways. No matter how hard we try, you will always confound us. Too often we try to reduce you into something we can fully comprehend, or something we can control...

Take the great American writer Ernest Hemingway, for example. Born in 1899, he was the epitome of the twentieth-century man. At age 25, he sipped champagne in Paris, and later had well-publicized game...

If you are an adult of average weight, here is what you accomplish in 24 hours: your heart beats 103689 timesyour blood travels 168,000,000 milesyou breathe 23040 timesyou inhale 438 cubic feet of ai...

When prayer consists of the same spoken sentences on every occasion, naturally we wonder at the value of the practice. If our prayers bore us, do they also bore God? Does God really need to hear me sa...

Andrew Carnegie rose to become among the world's richest individuals through his steel empire. In the midst of this acquisition of massive wealth at just thirty-three years old—Carnegie conducted ...

In her thought-provoking book, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes the tension in listening to our deepest desires: some of them these desires are integral to our identity, but they a...

The church fathers consistently acknowledged the beauty and goodness of desire (e.g., Augustine, above), but they were not naive to the potential for desire to be bent by sin. They knew that our longi...

There’s a somewhat naïve belief among some that, in general, most people are inherently good. While many Christians may not fully embrace John Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity (which I believe is ...

Like many others who find themselves in the spotlight, Elvis Presley struggled with his fame, as well as the many temptations that befell him during his time as an iconic musician. In 1958, following ...