Never thought I’d find myself choking back cheers of joy watching a 17 year old girl box her way to Olympic Gold. But that’s what happened last night as I watched Claressa Shields beat an opponent almost twice her age. Wasn’t raised to anticipate celebrating a woman boxer even though I was raised to read […]
After hurtling through 352 million miles of space for 8 and ½ months, carrying a 2.6 billion dollar Mars rover, the space-laboratory named Curiosity survived seven minutes of terror to make an amazingly ingenious landing on the red planet. Why curiosity? Because in yet one more attempt, NASA scientists are trying to find evidence of how […]
The words of the Bible can be like cut flowers. The words of Jesus, like the laws of Moses, can be selectively chosen and arranged for anyone’s temporary purposes and enjoyment. But once the words are sheared from the stem and root of the story they are telling, they begin to fade in significance like […]
In the early 1950s, a small Chicago-based religious sect predicted that the world was going to end on December 21, 1954. Their leader claimed to have received this information from an alien reincarnation of Jesus who went by the name of Sananda. Their prophecy caught the attention of researchers from Stanford University, who decided to […]
While meeting with a group of co-workers in Singapore, I looked out a seventh-story window and noticed a pile of huge, concrete blocks. When I asked about it, a colleague gave me some background. He said that since Singapore is a city-state built on an island, it is a common practice to test the stability […]
On StoryCorps, a project of National Public Radio, I heard 73-year-old Walter Dean Myers tell a story that he says has forever changed the way he remembers his father. Myers, an author with almost 100 books to his name, recalls that at 14 he already had a love for writing. Since his parents didn’t have […]
In a world as messed up as our own, there are many reasons to ask how a good God could allow this? And why? Long ago, a grieving, angry man found himself tormented by such questions as his friends accused him of hiding the scandal that would explain why he was suffering more than they […]
In October 2011, 56 wild animals terrorized the town of Zanesville, Ohio. The owner of an exotic animal park, troubled by legal challenges and neighbor complaints, had lashed out against the community by deliberately opening his cages just before dark. Local authorities responded by warning neighbors, barricading roads, and closing schools. After a couple of […]
A recent motion picture begins with powerful images from the Hubble telescope and the whispered question, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? . . . When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4,7). As a film, The Tree of Life (written […]
Before Jesus returned to his Father he challenged his disciples to teach others what he had taught them. At this point, questions linger from our past conversations. Were Paul, Peter, James, and John faithful to that Great Commission, even though they seldom quoted their Teacher in their New Testament letters? Seems to me that their […]
