Listen to “What Would Billy Do?”   One of the sadly comical and widely reported details of the second 2016 Republican debate was the number of times each candidate quoted Ronald Reagan or tried to present himself as assuming Reagan’s mantle. Mentioned by name 45 times, many viewers were left with the impression that either the candidates had no fresh ideas of their own or were hoping to get a posthumous endorsement. Moderator Jake Tapper said before one of the breaks, “Coming up, Ronald Reagan looming large over this debate.  So how Reaganesque exactly are these Republicans? We will find out next.” Will we experience something of the same following…

Listen to “A Fool’s Errand” In the Baptist church where I grew up, we heard rumors of “intellectuals” lurking in the world beyond our safe fellowship who relished the opportunity to attack our faith. While we had never met one, we knew that one day we would, and it would be the fight of our young lives. We had to be prepared. We had to have a plan and a set of responses. Fortunately, just as David served as our model for slaying giants and Samson for bringing down pagans, we had Paul’s confrontation with the philosophers of Athens as the way to best the intellectuals later in life. We…

Listen to “A Fool’s Errand” In the Baptist church where I grew up, we heard rumors of “intellectuals” lurking in the world beyond our safe fellowship who relished the opportunity to attack our faith. While we had never met one, we knew that one day we would, and it would be the fight of our young lives. We had to be prepared. We had to have a plan and a set of responses. Fortunately, just as David served as our model for slaying giants and Samson for bringing down pagans, we had Paul’s confrontation with the philosophers of Athens as the way to best the intellectuals later in life. We…

  Listen to “Stuck” Philip Yancey wrote about Dr. Paul Brand, the brilliant surgeon, who worked for many years in obscurity with lepers here in the States and in India. “He knew presidents, kings, and many famous people, but he rarely mentioned them, preferring instead to reminisce about individual leprosy patients. He talked openly about his failures and always tried to deflect credit for his successes to his associates. Every day he rose early to study the Bible and to pray. Humility and gratitude flowed from him naturally, and in our time together I sensed a desperate lack of these qualities in myself. Most speakers and writers I knew were…

In his book, “The Greatest Generation” Tom Brokaw wrote, “At a time in their lives when their days and nights should have been filled with innocent adventure, love, and the lessons of the workaday world, they were fighting in the most primitive conditions possible across the bloodied landscape of France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, and the coral islands of the Pacific. They answered the call to save the world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled, instruments of conquest in the hands of fascist maniacs. They faced great odds and a late start, but they did not protest. They succeeded on every front. They won the war;…

In “The Rise of Network Christianity” authors Brad Christerson and Richard Flory describe the members of a growing network of independent congregations aligning themselves under self-appointed apostles. “There’s a suspicion of any kind of accountability structures, because these limit the power of God working through individuals. When you have a church board and an elder board that hires a pastor, then that pastor can’t do the things that God is telling him to do—because he has to go to the board to get everything approved. The real danger, they would say, is when institutions become more powerful than the individuals that God calls.”  That must have been similar to the…

It was not even a major miracle. No one walked on water or fed five thousand. As far as miracles go it was almost incidental. A nameless crippled man healed. But, in that city, it was a sign of something far more remarkable. It was an opportunity to redress an old offense to the gods. Years before, the story went, Zeus and Hermes disguised as poor travelers arrived in town and were made unwelcome. In response, they destroyed the city and all the people with the exception of one humble couple. Now, many years later, the descendants of those who had made that fatal mistake took the miracle to mean…

I have been reading Thomas Merton’s “No Man Is An Island” and toward the last part of the book he describes a man he names the “proud solitary” who has no personal core. He is hollow and living in fear he will be discovered and exposed for what he is. “Maddened by his own insufficiency, the proud solitary shamelessly seizes upon satisfactions and possessions that are not due him, that can never satisfy him, and that he will never really need. Because he has never learned to distinguish what is really his, he desperately seeks to possess what can never belong to him. In reality, the proud solitary has no…

Bob Dylan wrote: Dear landlord Please don’t dismiss my case I’m not about to argue I’m not about to move to no other place Now, each of us has his own special gift And you know this was meant to be true And if you don’t underestimate me I won’t underestimate you. Reading all the messages of outrage at President Trump’s characterizations of Africa and Haiti as “shitholes” and his wonderment at why we cannot attract more immigrants from countries like Norway, I’ve been trying to get inside his head and come to some understanding of what he means by that and why he would say it that way. It’s…

Listen to “The Impossible Will of God”   Who doesn’t want to know the will of God? As a young man, that topic occupied me as much as any other. I recall reading Alan Redpath’s guidance that discerning the will of God is done best by aligning the lights of three beacons. First is circumstances. Second is the truth of Scripture. Last, the counsel of wise friends. If those line up there is good reason to believe you are in the will of God and your decision, while not guaranteed, will more likely be the right one. But, I have discovered over the course of my life that discerning the will…