“Church became all about ceremony, handholding, and kumbaya,” Phil said with a look of disgust. “I missed my old youth pastor. He actually knew the Bible.” I have known a lot of atheists. The late Christopher Hitchens was a friend with whom I debated, road tripped, and even had a Read more…
Larry, still in Vietnam, takes his life into his own hands and tours Saigon on a motor scooter. Did America lose the war? What Larry sees suggests otherwise. As I said in my previous post, Vietnam is the war we lost. Or is it? Upon arrival in Saigon, I decided Read more…
“If Hillary Clinton is elected,” began a passionate evangelical acquaintance to me over breakfast, “Christianity in America is over. America is over.” This cheery start to my morning served only to make my already burnt coffee that much more bitter. The anxiety such a statement expresses is common among evangelical Read more…
Last week I published a column here titled “Donald Trump and the Great Evangelical Compromise.” It created something of a stir. Studies suggest that people only read headlines or a paragraph or two, but seldom do they read whole articles and, well, I believe those studies are on to something Read more…
On January 6th, St. Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow, Scotland, hosted a guest reader for this Scottish Episcopal Church’s Feast of the Epiphany worship service. The reader was neither clergy nor Christian layman. Indeed, the reader was not a Christian at all. Moreover, the reading was not from the Bible, the Read more…
While Charles Schumer weeps and lawyers are deployed; as protesters protest and accusations fly — amidst all of the general hysteria about President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration, let’s pause, take a deep breath, and for a moment consider the apparent purpose of the order itself: To keep Americans Read more…
At this moment, I am on assignment in Europe, a continent that, like America, seems more screwed-up with every visit. To escape the insanity that threatens to engulf us all, this morning I decided to work remotely from a small French town. Hammering away on my laptop, I sat down Read more…
In a 1934 speech before the House of Commons, Winston Churchill said this: “Germany is arming fast, and no one is going to stop her. I dread the day when the means of threatening the heart of the British Empire should pass into the hands of the present rulers of Read more…
At home it’s a show trial. What about the rest of the world? “Your graphic of the Flag of this great Nation is unacceptable,” began @ronwilliamswv’s tweet blasting me. “UnAmerican. To be cute, it is depicted as flying upside down? Awful.” “It’s not meant to be ‘cute’ or ‘unAmerican,’” I Read more…
Recently I was asked to speak to a civic organization on the topic of diversity. Diversity, in the current vernacular anyway, is one of those concepts that defies a simple definition. I was looking over my notes beforehand in Starbucks trying to think of concrete examples when I saw a Read more…