Essays

In 1974, before my senior year at Cornell University, five dormmates and I decided to live off campus. An acquaintance had a rented house and needed five roommates. He seemed

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Selective Reasoning in Churches A few weeks ago, I visited a small rural Kentucky city where my daughter attends college. Since she hadn’t yet selected a church, I tried to

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My last essay, A Birthday (and Holiday) Lamentation, was a very personal exploration of some serious challenges in my life currently. It is a hard and sad post. Yet, there

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Eugene Peterson once observed, “We live in a culture that has replaced soul with self. This reduction turns people into either problems or consumers.” He warned that once this exchange

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Today is my Birthday…Happy Birthday to me? I don’t feel very happy. It feels more like a time for lamentation than joy. I had a very different essay planned for

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I am a Jewish believer in Jesus, and in 1982 I was working with Jews for Jesus at their Toronto branch. Toronto has a large and strong Jewish population. Many

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For Christmas this year, I decided to gather ten Christmas quotes from some of my favorite ministers and theologians. As I was putting them together, I realized that they were

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The Christmas classic The Little Drummer Boy, while a catchy tune, doesn’t have its origins in the biblical narrative, but in the mind of composer Katherine Kennicott Davis, who penned

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Over the last few days, I have seen story after story about how a pastor and TikToker has claimed that Barron Trump is close to salvation. I hope it is

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There are a number of articles that have been written on hymns and contemporary Christian music in the church. I have read several of them over the years, and it

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Early Success and Hidden Struggles I grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey, a suburb of New York City. I graduated from Hackensack High in 1971, got my B.A. from Cornell

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“If being hurt by church causes you to lose faith in God,” so the saying on a popular image macro goes, “then your faith was in people, not in God.”

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