genesis on School

The late comedian Sam Levenson enjoyed sharing funny anecdotes about his childhood, especially his early school days. One of his favorite stories was about his first day of school, when his overly pro...

And I was reminded of an event from my father’s childhood: He was in a Sunday school class, listening to his teacher expound on Genesis 1 and a young earth, and asked his teacher how to make sense o...

Who cannot relate in the digital age to the irony of being overconnected and lonely all at once? Yet Chief Justice John Roberts, speaking at his son’s middle school graduation, exhorted the young grad...

I…vividly remember one of my teachers telling the story of three young boys whose route to school went alongside a high wall. Every day as the boys walked to school, they wondered what was on the othe...

Nick believed his purpose was to speak to audiences, to become a motivational speaker, yet he had no experience, no resources, and no invitations. He decided to begin calling schools and offering to s...

A preaching professor at Harvard University tells the story of the year his 5-year-old son was working on an art project in his kindergarten class. It was made of plaster, resembled nothing in particu...

The Summer Before Junior High School was filled with anticipation. I was excited to leave elementary school behind me. Junior high sounded so robust and adult. And I felt ready—with one caveat. Physic...

Where do you turn for marriage advice when you aren’t religious? This is becoming an ever-increasing question as western cultures become more and more secular. One option is to turn to the London-base...

Of the medieval church’s many intellectual leaders, none has had more influence than the philosophical theologian Thomas Aquinas. He was born to a noble family near Naples, Italy, and joined the Domin...

Light flies. If you don’t believe me, go outside tonight, crank up the family car, and try to race the beam streaming from the headlights to the end of the driveway. Light is fast—really fast—travelin...

Lamin Sanneh, the African theologian who would be pivotal in the development of missional theology, was raised in an orthodox Muslim household in Gambia. He found himself drawn to Christianity after e...

In Four Quartets , T. S. Eliot writes that “any action is a step to the block.” He means that our actions always draw us closer to death, and in that sense every action we take is a wager of our ...

Invitations are powerful. Like tides, they ebb and flow, shaping the contours of our existence. Some invitations we desperately want but never get—“Will you marry me?” or “Would you consider a promoti...

Lent 2024: Do This in Remembrance Remembrance and Gratitude AIM commentary Ancient lens What's the historical context? Ancient Boundaries The world of Jesus and of the early church sa...

Spoiler Alert: This review contains some minor spoilers about the plot of The Last of Us . Content Alert: The Last of Us contains adult themes, graphic violence, nudity, and strong language. ...

Plenipotentiary Anyone know what a “plenipotentiary” is? Try that compound Latin word on for size! It is derived from the Latin words plenus “full” and potens “power.” It refers to a person who p...

Preaching Commentary Plenipotentiary Anyone know what a “plenipotentiary” is? Try that compound Latin word on for size! It is derived from the Latin words plenus “full” and potens “power.” It r...

When my two daughters, Hannah and Nancy, were about two or three years old, I noticed how they imitated and reflected my wife and me. They cooked, fed and disciplined their play animals and dolls just...

Work is one way, perhaps even the main way, we can glorify God in this life. This may sound confusing if you tend to think of glorifying God as what we do in church when we sing praises to God. No qu...

God uses our identity crises to reveal who we are and who he is. Sometimes these crises come out of nowhere. Something devastating happens. Someone close to us dies. We are diagnosed, or someone we kn...

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...

When John Stuart Mill—the influential philosopher and political economist—arrived at Thomas Carlyle's door that evening, his face drained of color, bearing the devastating news that the manuscript...

There’s no shortage of the religiously faithless who seem eager to tell us what faith is. Many of these characterizations of faith are reminiscent of Mark Twain’s precocious schoolboy who quipped, “Fa...

What is Liturgy? I know that not all of us come from so-called “liturgical” traditions, but all of us do use a liturgy of sorts. Liturgy is a compound Greek word meaning “public work” that is associa...

My wife was grading a science test at home that she had given to her elementary-school class and was reading some of the results to me. The subject was “The Human Body,” and the first question was: “N...

Shame makes its way into our stories at an early age. So early, in fact, that we usually have no conscious memory of our initial encounters with it. This can take place as early as fifteen to eighteen...

The Texas-based pastor Matt Chandler spent a decade working with teenagers, and during that time, he realized how a specific change takes place between sixth graders and ninth graders. As Chandler say...

How many shortcuts have been justified with the best of intentions? At the sentencing for her role in the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal, actress Lori Loughlin addressed the court:  “I mad...

While I was born much too late to be the legal property of a person in America, I have been the recipient of racism. When a classmate called me a racial epithet in my first year of college, I was deva...

Speedy Morris is the basketball coach for LaSalle University. He was shaving when his wife told him he was wanted on the phone by Sports Illustrated. He got so excited over the prospect of national re...