At 19, I took a summer job in a canning factory. For nine hours every day, I stood on hard concrete 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 — the stuff of everyday life.…

Unfortunately, the overreaction to shame in general has led to our wanting to eliminate it entirely and to celebrate those who are shameless – and that’s a shame.

Unfortunately, the overreaction to shame in general has led to our wanting to eliminate it entirely and to celebrate those who are shameless – and that’s a shame.

Our leaders and cultural elite have no capacity for understanding — or taking seriously — the theology and actions of militant Islam.

We distort Jacob’s life when we try to make it more than it was —a day-to-day unremarkable pattern of the ordinary.

A few years ago I heard an earnest, well-intentioned speaker present a message on the topic of the Biblical model of giving. It was the story of the widow’s mite and, as you might guess, the conclusion was we should be willing to give everything we have. I started thinking about that because I had heard almost my whole life that this story was the Biblical model for giving and, ideally, the gold standard. However, as I started looking at the different stories about giving in Scripture I realized there is a wide diversity of giving styles in Scripture — not just one. David. A leader gives leadership gifts. When…

Today we would likely label Jacob a sociopath: cunning, deceptive, detached, manipulative and ambitious. He was often cruel and incapable of being loyal. He lived by his wits - and was extremely successful.

In the evangelical community, there is still the lingering doubt that money invested in a business will not be as pleasing to God as money given away.

For Christmas, our kids gave us tickets to a Sting concert in Dallas. They know how much I like his music and how unlikely I am to spend the money to see him perform live. The whole experience was priceless, and Sting was in top form. He ended the evening by singing “Fragile,” which has become something of an anthem in times of sudden outbreaks of extraordinary violence. On the evening of September 11, 2001, Sting was scheduled to perform in Tuscany, Italy, and record his first live album in 15 years. We all remember what happened earlier in the day, which left the band wrestling with whether or not to go…

As much as anything Dad relished making and fixing things. What he really loved were the tools. He collected them partly because he needed the right tools to do the work essentially with one hand and partly because he loved working with them. He found delight in patiently figuring out the essence of a problem and then coming up with a solution that was brilliant - and incredibly ugly.