arts and culture on Misdirection

Robert Ingersoll, the well-known agnostic, once visited Henry Ward Beecher, the abolitionist and celebrated American preacher of the time. While there, he noticed a stunning globe that displayed the s...

Some of the Words are Theirs: The Art of Writing and Living a Sermon by is a book by a preacher who loves the craft of writing . And what is the writing of poetry, fiction, essay, but offering ins...

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. . . . The truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.

Computers give rise to many amusing salutations that could also offend. Humorous examples include the legendary Mr. Obe, a fine old West African name that didn’t happen to belong to the recipient (OBE...

Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally,...

Today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simpl...

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

There is a danger that you will mislive—that despite all your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life. There is, in other wo...

Editor’s Note: This story is often told as a true story, when in fact it is probably fictitious. Nevertheless, there is a significant illustrative point: sometimes the things we fear most may in fact ...

[The one] who hurries delays the things of God.

An American woman visiting the Philippines, observed an elderly woman on the outskirts of Manila. She looked poverty-stricken and walked with the help of a cane down into a ditch alongside a main road...

God does lead his people on roundabout ways. He does not move hastily. He is never in a hurry. It is one of his most irritating qualities.

The Clinical psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi describes how our minds, without stimuli, tends to quickly turn towards negative thoughts, our dissatisfaction. Contrary to what we tend to assume, ...

“Spirituality” wrongly understood or pursued is a major source of human misery and rebellion against God.

The simple truth of our being gets lost in the metanarratives we spin. We become the fictions we live. Consequently, our way of being in the world is so false and unnatural that our presence is thorou...

Moralistic behavior change done for one's self simply manipulates and leverages radical selfishness without challenging it.

We're not trying to prove the character of God through science. That's a bad idea. What I'm trying to do is clear away the misunderstandings, the debris that prevent people from accepting ...

Dan B. Allender, in his book Leading Character, tells the story of a friend whose daughter was diagnosed with leukemia. He kept news of his daughter’s illness to himself, fearing that his employees wo...

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a p...

Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil.

When we tell a story, a lot goes without being explained. For example, I might say, “After I finished speaking, I looked at the audience. They were all smiling. Someone in the back shot me a big okay....

In the beginning, the universe was created. This has been widely regarded as a bad move. (for contrast, and humor)

A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude toward God.

In our culture slow is a pejorative. When somebody has a low IQ, we dub him or her slow. When the service at a restaurant is lousy, we call it slow. When a movie is boring, again, we complain that it’...

In the middle of a prayer, whether praying silently or aloud, my mind would bounce from one thing to the next. Dear God in heaven, I pray that you heal my friend who has cancer. Work in her life now i...

A fanatic has been described as a person who, when unsure of his direction, doubles his speed.

The biggest deception of our digital age may be the lie that says we can be omni-competent, omni-informed, and omni-present. . . . We must choose our absence, our inability, and our ignorance—and choo...

...You are excused from doing the work of constructing the fantasy. The ads do it for you. The ads, therefore, don’t flatter your adult agency, or even ignore it—they supplant it.