Today is Thanksgiving and tomorrow is Black Friday. We know the majority of all Americans will be shopping over the long weekend with 20 percent shopping today and 70 percent tomorrow. More than 43 percent will be shopping on Saturday (Small Business Saturday) and another 48 percent on Cyber Monday. The holiday shopping season has begun and the expectations from retailers and online merchants are high this year. However, it is not like it used to be when retailers were accustomed to the holidays making up 25 percent of their annual sales. In fact, the trend has been steadily declining and today sales in November and December now account for…

When I was on the Board of “Christianity Today” a number of the editors were concerned the adjective “evangelical” was losing its distinct meaning. The term had gradually become a label used in polls for voting segments in political elections. As such, it was no longer a theological term but had, over time, morphed into a broad demographic label that had little to do with theological distinctives. Yes, there were still some who defined evangelical by their doctrinal views. However, the word itself was becoming more defined by political, tribal and cultural issues than theological positions. That is why the editors came to us with some suggestions about what we…

As a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Roger Thurow came to Tyler asking questions about hunger and what was being done locally. Now a senior fellow with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Roger had been a journalist covering, among other things, global food and agriculture for thirty years in Europe and Africa. While he was here, we had some time in between his interviews and our conversation turned not only to hunger globally and in the United States but to Christian philanthropy and the role it plays in those issues. At that time I was concerned about the almost exclusive focus of much of evangelical philanthropy on…

I love the art of Andrew Wyeth and his family – father N.C. and son, Jamie. Last week I made my first visit to the Brandywine River Museum with friends and sitting in front of Jamie’s portrait of Shorty, a local railroad worker and hermit posed in an elegant wing chair, I started thinking about two sons of slaves who became great artists and builders – perhaps the most famous in the Bible. The Lord chose Bezalel and Oholiab to build the Tabernacle and filled them “with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills – to make artistic designs for work…

How many times have we heard the phrase, “Come, let us reason together”? Like many, I’ve thought if only we could sit down and be rational about our differences, we could come to a reasonable understanding. After all, we are mature adults, right? We all want what is best. Well, it turns out that reasoning out our differences is a very small part of coming to understand what they are and how we resolve them without violence. In Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Righteous Mind” he expands on a metaphor he first used in an earlier book, “The Happiness Hypothesis.” Each of us is two parts – our intuition and our…