proverbs on Gifts

I have been moved to a different course of action, however, inspired largely by my daily exposure to college students in a great university during the course of a preaching and teaching ministry that ...

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...

In an old joke, people refer to seminary as cemetery. Attending one does feel like that at times, so the last thing I expected to discover in a dingy classroom in the basement of a Pasadena seminary s...

In his book of sermons titled The Magnificent Defeat, Frederick Buechner mentions two qualities of childlikeness. First, children have no fixed preconceptions of reality. If someone tells them that ...

While Christmas traditions vary the world over, gift-giving is a central practice just about anywhere Christ's birth is celebrated. Sometimes gifts are exchanged on De­cember 6, the feast day of S...

The biblical theology of creation is a negation of theories of private” property and “public” property, our theories of individual ownership and collective or governmental ownership. The biblical view...

A gift’s value is in the way it makes and reaffirms bonds between people. It’s an expression of a relationship. This isn’t to say that the cost of a gift doesn’t matter, but it certainly isn’t the mos...

The other way to destroy the relational bonds of gift giving is to turn a gift into a commodity. Let’s say it’s my birthday. Ten friends come over to my house, and we eat a good meal, and they all bri...

The story is well known in the family: my grandparents had driven up from California the evening before. Stopping at a gas station along the Oregon border, they purchased some snacks, gas, and, as the...