The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called ‘truth.’
In the fall of 2009, I was invited to go on a month-long speaking tour throughout Africa. During the trip, a CEO from South Africa named Salim took me to Soweto, a township just outside of Johannesbur...
Exodus 24:15–18, 1 Kings 19:9–12, Isaiah 30:15, Mark 1:35, Luke 5:15–16, Psalm 2:1–2
Recently a professor shared with me a college student’s reflections in response to my earlier writings on solitude and silence: I was not born into a world relatively unaffected by technology lik...
It’s wrong to shame someone!” the student asserted, with clear pain in her eyes. Just to be clear, I hadn’t done anything, but she seemed to be talking about some personal experience. “Is it always wr...
It’s wrong to shame someone!” the student asserted, with clear pain in her eyes. Just to be clear, I hadn’t done anything, but she seemed to be talking about some personal experience. “Is it always wr...
What we call “nature” isn’t the same nature our great-grandparents knew. Even if they lived as far south as Baltimore, they could cut eighteen-inch blocks of ice off ponds in the winter to cool their ...
I’ll never forget sitting in the guidance counselor’s office my freshman year in high school in the Lehigh Valley area between Philadelphia and Allentown, where I grew up. The purpose of our meeting w...
They are not the best students who are most dependent on books. What can be got out of them is at best only material; a man must build his house for himself.
Listen to this letter a college student once wrote to her parents: Dear Mom and Dad, I’m so sorry to be so long in writing you. Unfortunately, all my stationary was destroyed the night our dormito...
In 2017 Rebekah Morris was teaching English and journalism at Cross Keys High School, a public high school in Atlanta. Noticing that her students had really important, insightful things to say about t...
To love God intellectually is to become a student of God—a student who really takes an interest in God. Have you ever noticed that a fair number of Christians are not particularly interested in God? S...
Almighty God, you proclaim your truth in every age by many voices: Direct, in our time, we pray, those who speak where many listen and write what many read; that they may do their part in making the h...
I have a little game I play when traveling. I regularly hear strangers meeting strangers, and usually within thirty seconds to a minute one asks the other, “What do you do?” Well, when someone asks me...
For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when, in memory of the bitter hours when we ...
I've seen far too many Christians who are more than willing to travel halfway around the world to volunteer for a week in an orphanage, but who cannot bring themselves to take the personal risk of...
Have you ever wondered the impact noise can have on our cognitive ability? Psychologist Arlene Bronzaft was curious to find out. Studying Public School 98 on the northern tip of Manhattan, Bronzaft fo...
Proverbs 21:13, Matthew 25:40, Luke 4:18, James 1:27
Teenage prostitutes, during interviews in a San Francisco study, were asked: “Is there anything you needed most and couldn’t get?” Their response, invariably preceded by sadness and tears was unanimou...
Deuteronomy 30:19-20, Joshua 24:15, Matthew 6:24, Luke 10:41-42, Matthew 7:13-14 , Psalm 16:11
I had a memorable lunch a few years ago with my friends Mike and Claudia, who had recently returned from Malawi, a small country in southeastern Africa. We were sitting in a booth at one of those chai...
I must register a certain impatience with the faddish equation, never suggested by me, of the term identity with the question, “Who am I?” This question nobody would ask himself except in a more or le...
Nearly every racial minority in the US understands Euro-white culture pretty well, but we whites are far more ignorant of how the cultures of others operate.
Westerners have a complicated relationship with money. We don’t like it when wealthy people receive special treatment or look down on the rest of us as riffraff. But many (can we say most?) of us aspi...
In their excellent book Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien share the importance of recognizing the lens through which see the world: We speak as insi...
You don’t need to look far today to notice that personal identity is a do-it-yourself project. A gym near where I live advertises itself with the slogan: “Be Fit. Be Well. Be You.” A new apartment com...
In a study conducted by Timothy Wilson, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, researchers discovered what most of us already know: people do not like to be left alone with their own tho...
Galatians 6:10, John 13:1-17, Luke 10:25-37, Colossians 3:14, 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, Philippians 2:3-4, 1 John 4:7-8
Is life not full of opportunities for learning love? Every man and woman every day has a thousand of them. The world is not a playground; it is a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an education. A...
Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addic...
The United States retains a basic respect for religion though it may be following European trends: surveys show a steady rise in the “nones” (now one-third of those under the age of thirty), that is, ...
When I say “New Testament” or “a theological seminary,” in most cases I can see from their reaction that they immediately and radically reverse their evaluation. From a relatively high place in their ...
An excellent way to test people’s values is to observe what we do when we don’t have to do anything, how we spend our leisure time, how we spend our extra money.
My favorite scene in the 1987 movie Broadcast News is the moment when young Aaron, who has just graduated as valedictorian of his high school class, is attacked in the schoolyard after the ceremonies ...