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One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow © 2010 Zondervan 202 pages I can’t think of a better refresher for North American Christians, on the eve of the new year, than McKnight’s latest offering: One.Life. He begins by shooting down the sub-par version of Christianity that’s so prevalent in Western evangelicalism: that being a Christian means accepting [...]

It seems appropriate on the eve of a new year to learn some lessons from history. Here’s the first of four weekend wisdom quotes from Will & Ariel Durant (The Lessons of History). Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and [...]

The Cocktail Party © 1950 Faber and Faber 195 pages The Cocktail Party: A Comedy is painfully tragic from a Christian perspective. A wife leaves her husband because he’s having an affair. Years later, the second woman becomes a Christian and is killed on the mission field. The husband and wife meanwhile have worked at [...]

Lord Jesus Christ, thou Son of the Most High, Prince of Peace, be born again into our world. Wherever there is war in this world, wherever there is pain, wherever there is loneliness, wherever there is no hope, come, thou long-expected one, with healing in thy wings. Holy Child, whom the shepherds and the kings [...]

I’m reading through The Message. Here’s a penetrating observation by Peterson in his introduction to the Prophets: They don’t explain God. They shake us out of old conventional habits of small-mindedness, of trivializing god-gossip, and set us on our feet in wonder and obedience and worship. If we insist on understanding them before we live [...]

We tried something new this fall at WSPC. Over the summer months I solicited questions from the congregation about matters of faith. Then, in October and November, I condensed the questions into 7 messages. The results of our experiment are below. You can find individual write-ups along with the resources I used in each message [...]

The Outward Urge © 1959 Penguin 187 pages You can enjoy The Outward Urge on a couple different levels. On the surface, it’s a collection of short stories about humanity’s exploration of space. Dig a little deeper and a couple sub-themes stand out. These stories cover 200 years of the history of the Troon family [...]

Do you remember when Hannah asked God for a child? She was so desperate that the priest thought she was drunk. Here’s Wallace’s take on that story (in Hannah’s Prayer and Its Answer): No matter how well-trained and experienced we may be, our attempts to discover what is really going on beneath the surface when [...]

I have to share one of the latest posts from James McGrath (Exploring our Matrix). He beautifully describes the roots of Christianity’s inferiority complex. I wonder how the golden rule applies to a stolen holiday? Christmas: The Christian War on Solstice

Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time ©2000 Alfred A. Knopf Canada 256 pages Have you ever imagined what life was like before time zones? Every village had their own time. Noon was when the sun stood directly overhead. New Year’s Eve was a wave of celebration that spread town-by-town across [...]