This week I received a note from my close friend of many years, Terry Parker. He wrote: “As I think you know, about five years ago one of my grandchildren, Katie, who was nine years old, was given a death sentence because of a brain tumor. She came to live with us as we are a mile and a half from Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. In seven months from diagnosis she had died. While she was with us, I read to her every day for hours. But I could tell that she was sad because she couldn’t do what the children in the books I was reading were doing. I…

Dr. Gardner Taylor died this week. For 42 years he served as the senior pastor of the 10,000-member Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. He was the author of many books and 2,000 sermons, as well as the recipient of 15 honorary doctorates. Gardner was named by TIME magazine as the dean of black preachers and considered one of the most influential preachers in the English-speaking world. As a close friend of Martin Luther King, he shaped the earliest years of the civil rights movement when in 1961 he and Dr. King founded the Progressive National Baptist Convention. This gave Dr. King a national base of hundreds of…

In 1967 film maker and devout Christian Irwin “Shorty” Yeaworth (whose first popular movie was “The Blob”) produced “The Gospel Blimp” as a send-up of the craze over mass evangelism using the latest technology to reach a whole community in the most effective way possible – an inflatable blimp manned by a “Commander” and his crew. They towed Bible-verse banners, “firebombing” the unchurched citizens with thousands of gospel tracts and broadcasting Christian music and programs over loudspeakers. Things unravel and the new technology ends up being just one more way of wasting money with little positive effect. But for a brief moment it is new and exciting and full of…

If you caught Sixty Minutes this week you had a glimpse into the crushing plight of Christians in Iraq specifically and the Middle East in general. The Christian population in Iraq has been reduced from 1.5 million to less than 300,000—through slaughter, forced migration, conversion under duress and fear. More than 125,000 Christians have fled to Kurdistan and are huddled there in refugee camps. The entire Christian population of Mosul has disappeared and, according to a priest interviewed by CBS reporter Lara Logan, the intent of ISIS is to completely eradicate the Christians: “To wipe them out. To be nothing. No place left that bears the name of Christian or…

Lieber uses conversations around money to help inculcate seven basic values in our kids that will lead them to become mature adults.

Spock always said what he thought and was bewildered at how humans complicated and confused issues with emotions - anger, fear, love and attachment.

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.