The drug problems in the U.S. demonstrate this pattern: by heightening powers of perception, chemical stimulants open up a new world to a generation that has never learned to appreciate fully the worl...
Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will percei...
In 1889, the French novelist Paul Bourget penned The Disciple , where he depicted the life of a renowned philosopher and psychologist, whose existence was marked by a seemingly monotonous routine...
In this short (and humorous) excerpt, author David Zahl shares a definition of the secular: Perhaps secular warrants its own explanation, though. My most immediate association comes from the belov...
An attempt to wrest from God the prerogatives of absolute freedom and infinity leads to the inversion of Pentecost and what is in effect a new Babel. 'Postmodernism' represents that Babel perf...
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...
In 1882—seven years before his descent into madness—Friedrich Nietzsche published a parable called The Madman . In the parable, a madman comes into a village on a bright, sunny morning holding al...
O Father of all creation, who hovered over the deep at the beginning, who spoke light into darkness, who split the heavens open and descended upon the Son of God in the waters of the Jordan, who creat...
This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived from the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is derived from this…. We all like astonishing tales because they to...
In his classic fictional work on spiritual warfare, The Screwtape Letters , C. S. Lewis imagined a senior demon (Screwtape) corresponding with one of his protégés (his nephew Wormwood) as the latte...
In an interview with MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle, Megan Garber asks what makes in-person conversation unique, compared to all the other ways we communicate these days: Conversations, as they tend...
“Create” may be the English word for bringing something into existence, notes scholar John Walton, but that English word isn’t in the Hebrew Bible. Instead, the word is “bārāʾ.” So, if we are going t...
Medical doctor Paul Brand, who is best known for discovering the cause of leprosy and developing a treatment for it, reflects on the nature and design of the universe. The more I delve into natural l...
In the crypt of the Capitol, there hangs a bronze plaque commemorating the inventor of telegraphy, Samuel Morse…In 1825, Morse returned to Washington to paint a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette, t...
God is the author of the physical world, and in his wisdom, he designed physical realities to convey spiritual mysteries. “There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God,” as C. S. Lewis insist...
Christianity Does Not Reject the Body The “spirit-good / body-bad” dualism that often passes for Christianity is actually an ancient gnostic error called “Manichaeism,” and it couldn’t be further from...
Surprisingly enough, it was in the process of staying faithful to the spiritual journey that I first began to face my profound ambivalence about life in a body. At the ripe old age of thirty, I could ...
Christians are often accused of two wrong-headed views of the body. One is that we ignore the body in favor of a disembodied, spirits-floating-on-clouds spirituality. The other is that we are obsessed...
J.M. Montgomery’s novel Emily of New Moon has a passage that conveys the attractive and terrifying aspects of the mystery of God: It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, th...
After finishing a major project, have you ever stood back, taken in what you have accomplished, and said to yourself, “That’s pretty good”? I’ll admit that I have on numerous occasions, especially aft...
Sin is looking to something else besides God for your salvation. It is putting yourself in the place of God, becoming your own savior and lord, as it were.
I asked the earth, I asked the sea and the deeps, among the living animals, the things that creep. I asked the winds that blow, I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars and to all things that...