Throughout the month of August, we’re taking a close look at 23 verses of the New Testament. They comprise Ephesians chapter one, which paints one of the Bible’s most comprehensive pictures of what it means for ordinary people to be “in Christ.” “Pound for pound,” the New Testament book of Ephesians is quite possibly the most influential document in human history. It’s… Read more »
If a single individual can be credited with the founding of modern American surgery, William Halsted should be mentioned first. During the late 1800s Halsted was one of the “Big Four” physicians who helped launch Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. A surgical virtuoso, he was personally responsible for innovating a number of critical procedures. Halsted was also one of the first surgeons… Read more »
The odds are good that at some point in your life you’ve had the chance to play a revolutionary musical instrument called a soft-loud. These days we usually call it a piano. For the better part of three centuries (the early 1500s through the early 1800s) the harpsichord was the primary portable keyboard instrument available to European musicians. It’s essentially an innovative… Read more »
It’s summertime, the season for hot dogs. There have always been two great mysteries surrounding the quintessential American snack: What are they really made of? And who actually invented them? The first mystery has become the stuff of urban legend – as in, why does one never see a stray dog sniffing around an Oscar Mayer plant? The FDA assures us that our… Read more »
In 1979, the Charlie Daniels Band proved that a song about fiddles could become a national hit. The Devil Went Down to Georgia is the account of an epic fiddle-playing contest between Satan and a young man named Johnny. Who is the ultimate virtuoso? The stakes are high – Johnny’s soul. But as Daniels lets us know at the end… Read more »
When author and pastor Rob Bell was a teenager, he and his family attended a church service in a town they were visiting. At the end of the service, they experienced a drama that is played out in a number of conservative congregations. The pastor invited those present to make a first-time commitment to Christ. He announced that if people repeated the… Read more »
“You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do you, punk?”(Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry) San Francisco’s famously unhinged police inspector isn’t typically a source of theological insight. But his quotable quote spotlights our culture’s fascination with what can only be described as one of the most unreliable sources of human guidance: luck. People who think luck is… Read more »
Don’t be an idiot. Be polite. If those two sentences don’t appear to be natural go-togethers, it’s because we’ve lost track of the origin of a pair of words that were once intimately related. Let’s start with the Greek word idiotes (id-ee-OH-tays). In ancient times an idiotes was someone who chose not to participate in civic life. Such a person often lived and… Read more »
In the vast majority of human languages, nouns and verbs have all the fun. Those forms of speech are usually at the center of the action when it comes to communication. Prepositions, however, aren’t far behind. That’s because they express relationships between words. And that can matter a great deal. When someone says, “The boat is in the water,” our… Read more »
Everyone agreed that it was a wonderful painting – Paolo Veronese’s ginormous depiction of Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper. But was it really a religious painting? Church authorities in Venice in 1573 were deeply offended by what they saw on the canvas. Why were so many of “the wrong people” basking in the gracious presence of Jesus? Veronese, along… Read more »
