First Words

Practice the beatitudes. Speak truth to power. Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.

Small deceptions work like a narcotic, making us feel nicely respectable. Especially in church.

Instead of glorifying the past, what if we treated the present as precious?

He was exonerated—but the state refused to pay him for his 30 years on death row.

What to do with that stack of old Bibles (or that stack of old issues of the Century)?

A missed flight, a cheap motel, and a mushy apple

As I drive past boarded-up churches, I am more convinced than ever that many congregations could afford to revisit their neighbor ethic.

In America, we cherish the inalienable right to have things our way.

The cross is anything but a success story. Failure and disappointment are at the heart of Christianity.

Those of us who sought to change the congregation's communion practice met with indifference. So late one Saturday I took matters into my own hands.

My friend the public defense attorney doesn't teach her clients to evade error. She helps them acknowledge it—and stop pretending.

What the people see in Jesus is more than raw power.

An eccentric existence is one where God forms the center of life, becoming the axle of our self-understanding.

After sharing laudatory remarks about Nai-Wang Kwok, the YDS dean invited him to respond. I have thought a lot about the three sentences Kwok said before he sat down again.

A tall stack of books on the floor of my bedroom greets me each morning. Its very presence is exhausting.

The traveler eats whatever food is placed before her; she aims to learn as much of the language as possible. A tourist sacrifices less.

I keep a 36-inch utility shovel in my church office. I use it to dig the graves that hold the cremains of our congregation's saints.

A poor person looking up at my residence could mistake it for one of the barns belonging to the rich man Jesus talked about—the one who didn't know his soul was buried beneath all that corn and sorghum.

Moral concern usually begins when one person makes an effort to become, in some measure, one with the other. Privilege impedes this.

Like Adam, we may end up treating God as if God were at the periphery. But where there is no center—or where we become the center—the circumference of life disappears.