humor on Faith

Writing about ministering to postmodern skeptics, Don Everts and Doug Schaupp share a helpful insight into the mystery of God's movement: The first lesson they have taught us about the path to f...

In this excerpt, author David Zahl challenges the common belief that religion is “in decline.” He argues that while Westerners, particularly younger generations, may be distancing themselves from the ...

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence…. Faith, being belief that isn...

Faith according to our Lord’s teaching in this paragraph is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him. . ....

In his book, A Peculiar Glory , John Piper provides an illustration of the kind of faith we are called to. This is no “blind faith,” in which we are supposed to simply believe without using our minds...

While global flights and online booking have made travel easier in many ways, other aspects, often related to safety and security, still create challenges. As often as I fly, I could tell you plenty o...

In his book The Mystery of Christ , a series of fictionalized pastoral counseling sessions (based on actual events), the Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon shares a number of helpful ways of unde...

Have you ever noticed that the phrases in our culture favor doubt over faith? The famed missionary and theologian Lesslie Newbigin pointed this out when we speak of “Honest doubts” and “blind faith”. ...

In his introduction to Scott Sauls’ Book, Irresistable Faith, Bob Goff tells a story about a summer adventure hitchhiking across New England, which would ultimately lead to staying with a hermit in Ma...

Humor points to faith in that both humor and faith spring up in response to the reality of the paradox and the incongruities at the heart of human experience. But while humor responds well to the lowe...

Too often we are given a choice—emotions or faith and belief. Yet as Dan Allender and Tremper Longman observe,  Emotion links our internal and external worlds. To be aware of what we feel can open ...

In the novel The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien, there is a poem called the “Riddle of Strider.” One stanza goes like this:  All that is gold does not glitter;  Not all who wan...

On February 24, 1791, Christian revivalist and pastor John Wesley penned a letter to encourage a Christian walking through some faith challenges:  Unless the divine power has raised you up . . . I...

If the Book of Job reaches across two and a half millennia to teach anything to men and women who consider themselves normal, decent human beings, it is this: Human beings are sure to wander in ignora...

Charles Templeton was a close friend and preaching associate of Billy Graham in the 1940s. He effectively preached the gospel to large crowds in major arenas. However, intellectual doubts began to nag...

Bill Irwin was not the first person ever to walk the Appalachian Trail. He was not the only individual to begin in Springer Mountain, Georgia, and conclude on Mount Katahdin, Maine. Other adventuresom...

We all desire to learn from our role models, but some take this ambition to the next level. The writer Hunter S. Thompson was so obsessed with the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and specifically his...

The foundation of faith is a firm conviction regarding three things about God—his perfect love, wisdom and power. Like a three-legged stool, no combination of two will do. There must be all three for ...

When most of us grow up in a faith tradition, we begin with an assumption that faith is good, while having doubts is bad. As we mature however, we realize that faith and doubt are not opposites, but i...

Jesus said, “It is more blessed to give than receive.” “Well,” you say “that is a nice theory—but is it really true?” There is really only one way to find out: Give! Give generously and consistently, ...

In the [Roman] catacombs, we are told, explorers take a thread with them through all the dark passages and tortuous windings, and by this thread they find their way back again to the light. There is s...

It is a Masai elder who tells the story. It comes from the book, Christianity Rediscovered, in which the Roman Catholic missionary, Vincent Donovan, shares his discoveries as he worked among Masai peo...

In this excerpt from his book Faith in the Shadows, pastor and author Austin Fischer shares a surprising truth about the need to be vulnerable with our own faith if we are likely to have a positive im...

Speaking on the essential element of gratitude as part of our faith, the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar once said, “We need only to know who and what we really are to break into spontaneous p...

In a quiet hospital room in North Carolina, an eager young doctor with a bright future evaluates his elderly patient with not much future left at all. She has a terminal heart condition, inoperable. A...

In Silence, Shusaku Endo writes of the journey of Portuguese Jesuits journeying to Japan. It is a conversation about those who intend to take the path of Jesus, only to find they are on the path of Ju...

Just as our bodies need exercise to be strong physically, our faith needs exercise if we are to be strong spiritually. It has often been noted that several rivers flow into the Dead Sea, but no river ...

The farmers in the old prairie days used to prepare for a winter storm by putting up a rope between the house and the barn. They did this because they knew that in a swirling blizzard, even a brief di...

In April 1988 the evening news reported on a photographer who was a skydiver. He had jumped from a plane along with numerous other skydivers and filmed the group as they fell and opened their parachut...

Building an antifragile faith takes time. It can’t be rushed. Consider this: It takes (on average) around twelve to eighteen months ​to construct a new single-family home in America. This process incl...