To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. There’s something about the earth’s most dramatic geological events – earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis – that make people want to fire God. A few weeks after the December 2004 earthquake that sent mountainous walls of water crashing onto beaches around the Indian Ocean, taking more than 225,000 lives, Ron Rosenbaum of 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 »
Throughout November we’re taking an in-depth look at Ruth, the little book that helped pave the way for God’s Messiah to come into the world. “There’s good news and there’s bad news.” That’s the premise for a number of classic jokes, including the one about the two best buddies who spent a lifetime enjoying baseball. They both wondered if there… Read more »
Throughout November we’re taking an in-depth look at Ruth, the little book that helped pave the way for God’s Messiah to come into the world. Eleven years ago this fall, the Buffalo Bills – at that time one of the least competitive franchises in the National Football League – had a golden opportunity to defeat the Pittsburgh Steelers, one of… Read more »
Throughout November we’re taking an in-depth look at Ruth, the little book that helped pave the way for God’s Messiah to come into the world. According to the principle of Chekov’s Gun, there are no extraneous details in great stories. The Russian writer Anton Chekov (1860-1904) advised young playwrights, “If you reveal in the first act that there is a… Read more »
Life is full of close calls. I’m reminded of that when my family wades into one of those “Remember when…?” conversations that inevitably dredges up childhood near-misses. There was the day, for example, when I got too close to the neighbor’s burning brush pile while wearing my Davey Crockett-era frontier suit. Unbeknownst to me, the fringes caught on fire. An… Read more »
