Several years ago, a relative of mine got into trouble—the kind of trouble that causes you to stun your family and lose your friends, move to another state, and try to start your life over. The news of h...

I’m going to take a shot at writing this column from where I’m actually at, rather than where I’d like to be.Christian writers should be able to do this—show life as it really is, warts...

    In November 2004 I stood in a voting booth in South Boston, where I was living at the time, and flipped a coin.     I felt unable to choose the conventional evangelical Christian ch...

Last winter, a young friend of mine named Rob gave up on his faith. I’ve seen people drift away from God before— me included—and I’ve seen people wilt in the face of hardships, doubt a...

Imagine that I could convince you that breathing was bad for you. I would let you continue to know that you had to breathe to, you know, stay alive and stuff, but I’d make you want to breathe as little as...

A few years ago I walked into class of undergraduates in Boston a moment before it was to begin and picked up the book I was using for instruction that day. It was not the typical textbook—it was a book ...

During the horrendous first weekend of last November as New Life Church in Colorado Springs reeled from the sudden fall of its senior pastor, Ted Haggard, one of the church’s associate pastors, Rob Brendl...

I’ve just returned from a “Jesus camp.” I spent the weekend with several dozen students from a Presbyterian church in southern Colorado talking about how the entertainment media represents Chr...

Here’s a story about memes.A meme is a little like a gene. It contains information, it is transmitted from host to host, and it survives according to its success or failure in a given environment.  T...

A few years ago, I was a teaching fellow at Boston University for an undergraduate course on the Bible. On the first day of the fall semester, the professor opened the class with a touch of drama. He walked in ...