To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. Jerks definitely make the world a more interesting place. Gary Larson likewise made the world far more interesting during the 15 years that his Far Side cartoons ran in syndication in more than 1,900 newspapers. Larson is now 72 years old and retired from the craft that made him globally famous. He put down… Read more »
To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. By and large, the Ten Commandments are wonderfully brief and straightforward. Don’t lie. Don’t murder. Don’t steal. Don’t commit adultery. The second commandment is a bit more complex: “Don’t make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. Don’t bow… Read more »
Malcom in the Middle, a sitcom about a comically dysfunctional family, was a smash hit on Fox for seven seasons (2000-2006). Lois, the overbearing mother (played by Jane Kaczmarek) is married to Hal, the emotionally immature but heart’s-in-the-right-place dad (played by Bryan Cranston, whom few people suspected at the time was on his way to becoming a critically acclaimed star). They… Read more »
Mary Ann Bird grew up feeling unlovely, unpresentable, unloved. From birth she had been afflicted with a variety of disfiguring features. She recounts her feelings – and the moment in which everything changed – in her book The Whisper Test: I grew up knowing I was different, and I hated it. I was born with a cleft palate, and when… Read more »
Sherlock Holmes, the world’s most famous fictional crime solver, died on December 1, 1893. That’s the date of the publication of “The Final Problem,” the last entry in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes expired dramatically, locked in arm-to-arm combat with his evil arch-enemy Dr. Moriarty. The two plunged into the frothy abyss of the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, never… Read more »
Throughout July we’re taking an in-depth look at Proverbs, the Bible’s one-of-a-kind book about our never-ending need for wisdom. In the summer of 1969, the world’s most famous rock band was falling apart. Splintered by long-simmering creative and relational spats, the Beatles somehow recorded Abbey Road, which fans and critics eventually came to regard as a masterpiece. It was the… Read more »
Throughout Lent, we’re exploring the parables of Jesus – the two dozen or so stories that were his chief means of describing the reality of God’s rule on earth. Jesus’ most famous story has no official name. Over the centuries it’s been called the Parable of the Prodigal Son, or the Two Brothers, or the Lost Child, or the Unforgiving… Read more »
