As some of you know, I enjoy taking pictures – and then finding something to say.

One of the features of the new tax reform law is doubling the standard deduction – and that is a good thing. The increase will be a genuine benefit to many middle-class families. However, it also means there will be less incentive to itemize deductions for giving and likely as well that charitable donations will suffer as a result. Much of the tax advantage of giving for 30 million people who currently itemize their deductions every year will go away. To offset this change one of the strategies proposed by advisors is putting off any annual giving not covered by the standard deduction and only give when the amount becomes…

For some time now I have been questioning if philanthropy is one of those words that has either lost its traditional definition (love of mankind) or should never have been used to describe giving in the first place. In fact, I wonder if our using “love of mankind” is possible or even desirable. Yes, there are numerous examples where giving springs from sincere feelings about the poor or a genuine desire to alleviate suffering, spread the Gospel, deliver health care, rescue young girls and boys from the bondage of trafficking, and restore dignity to people. No doubt these are good things – but are they really philanthropy? Or, are they…

Discoveries made through a mistake, battles lost by a sudden change of wind, unintentional inflection points in a life through a wrong turn. The history of our world is full of them. In fact, the closer we study major shifts the more likely we are to see they often hinged on seeming unimportant choices that made the outcome radically different. What if Archduke Ferdinand’s driver had not accidentally turned down the wrong street giving a Serbian nationalist his opportunity? What if the wind had not shifted on the Spanish Armada destroying their fleet? What if a dish of bacteria in the lab of Alexander Fleming had not been contaminated with…

More often than not when people long for the earliest church they have in mind an ideal that never existed. Almost from the beginning, it was tested with schisms, false teaching, infighting, jealousy, greed and celebrities with fans. I say almost because there actually was a short time – a matter of days – when things went smoothly. It’s likely those few days that people have in their minds when saying they want to restore the church to its original purity. It was the same with the disciples as Jesus was leaving them after forty days. What was their expectant question?  “Lord, are you going to restore the kingdom to…

Looking back now, it is difficult to believe in early 1972 I was singing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” in a choir for one of Arthur Blessitt’s crusades in Boston. You might remember Arthur as the man who carried the wooden cross around the world on foot. He logged 38,000 miles and visited 315 nations. A new Christian and like so many others, I had been swept up in the adventure of it. In June of that same year, I was part of the 100,000 high school and college students swarming in Dallas, Texas at the Cotton Bowl for Explo‘72. Sponsored by Campus Crusade, we had come from around the world…

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…