In 2017 Rod Dreher published “The Benedict Option” to define the new relationship between the world and the Church allowing the Church to survive an encroaching period of darkness and the loss of a dominant position.  “We should stop trying to meet the world on its own terms and focus on building up fidelity in distinct community. Instead of being seeker-friendly, we should be finder friendly, offering those who come to us a new and different way of life. It must be a way of life shaped by the biblical story and practices that keep us firmly rooted on the truths of that story in a world that wants to…

My father had a life removed from us that we knew little about until we were grown. It was only a few years before he died that I understood why. We talked about it on a series of trips we took as father and son when he was losing his health, and we knew it was just a matter of time before he could not travel at all. It was on our first of these trips that he told me about New York City and the Waldorf Astoria. Dad grew up in the poorest parts of Nashville, Tennessee. He was always a misfit there. While others resigned themselves to a…

It’s not just me but a growing number of people have made comments about a theme running through commencement speeches for the last several years. Do what matters most to you. Find your passion and follow it. Explore your deepest self. Follow your dreams and, most importantly, find yourself. It seems that the task is to make the world a better place for you chiefly. While that sounds like a value hatched by Baby Boomers and passed along to the next generation, the roots of it are found thousands of years ago in a passage from the book of Numbers. The tribes of Israel had managed to be obedient to…

Raised a Baptist I had no exposure to what I later learned is called the liturgical calendar. We observed Christmas, Easter, Lottie Moon offering for foreign missions, and Annie Armstrong offering for home missions. Anything more would have made us less Baptist and more like our almost-Christian friends the Methodists and Presbyterians. I thought Advent was no more than National Teacher Appreciation Day or Arbor Day. Later, because my father was eclectic, we did attend Presbyterian and Methodist services now and then. I say attended because we always knew this was not real worship. The hymns were different, the pulpit was misplaced and there was no fried chicken, Training Union…

For two summers as a student I took a job in a canning factory. For nine hours every day I stood on a hard concrete floor beside a press stamping out thousands of tin can lids. My job was to inspect the seals, stack them in a metal tube, bag them, put 24 bags in a box, and shove the box down a chute. The constant din of the machinery made any conversation with each other impossible. This was long before the Walkman or iPod so we were left alone with our thoughts for hours at a time. During the 15-minute breaks the talk was about family or sports —…

A big surprise for me when we moved to Tyler was how many people here travel all over the world. I expected a relatively small town in rural Texas to be more isolated and provincial. It remained puzzling until discovering that during the Great Depression there were very few places in the country with a strong economy and liquidity. Tyler was one of them and became an early example of venture capital and private equity. Families invested in properties on every continent and while many people assume the wealth of this community is built completely on oil, a good percentage of the wealth comes from those early investments. In many…

Star Trek lasted only three seasons on television. NBC cancelled it due to poor ratings but the show grew a cult-like following with much of the credit due to Leonard Nimoy’s portrayal of the unflappable Mr. Spock. The fan tributes to Nimoy after his death show that his character on Star Trek has remained a folk hero since the 60’s. While he understood the irrationality of our species and even struggled with his own half-human nature, Spock always said what he thought and was bewildered by how humans complicated and confused issues with emotions — anger, fear, love and attachment. In one episode, he said, “May I say that I…

Most of us are first made to read Shakespeare before we have enough life experience to even partially understand his genius. It wasn’t until I was teaching King Lear in senior English – and had a daughter of my own – before I realized King Lear was so much about his tangled relationship with his daughters and desperate attempt to pass off responsibility without giving up privilege. It was the tragic tale of a father demanding love and honor – things that could only be earned. Years went by and I didn’t reread King Lear until much later when I was co-teaching “The Wise Art of Giving” with Os Guinness…

A cardinal rule of teaching is never open with a line that makes it impossible to say anything more about the topic. That’s especially true if it is a lecture and you have 45 minutes to fill. In a discussion class you can always make the statement and then say “talk among yourselves” for the balance of the time. Of course, I am always suspicious that no one ever talks about the lesson but more likely goes straight to politics, sports or the kids. That’s the predicament I found myself in preparing a lesson on Isaiah 40 and the qualities of God. What can anyone say about the incomprehensible –…

“Thank God the evangelicals are a single issue bloc of voters.  I don’t know what we would do were they not.” My friend, the aspiring politician, had read the tea leaves, put his finger to the wind, and digested all the polls for coming to that conclusion making it easier for him to send the right message. In some areas of his district, he would not even spend money and time campaigning as long as the religious voters knew he was solid on that single issue. Nothing else mattered. Find the one issue about which they were united regardless of their other differences in denomination, worship, theology, and history. Pound…