There’s an overwhelming amount of beauty and awe in the world – from midday eclipses to bounding monkeys in jungles to the perfect curl of newborn baby toes.  At some point, though, we all encounter suffering. Sometimes it appears as physical pain; sometimes it’s in the form of prolonged waiting; sometimes it’s mental or emotional distress. Sometimes suffering occurs through our

What does your church do with people who are differently abled, disabled, mentally handicapped, handicapped, or crippled? (All of those terms have been used in my thirty-odd trips around the sun.) Do you have someone in your church who comes in a wheelchair? Do you have training for teachers and nursery workers, preschool workers and children’s ministers on how to engage kids

Today is the day after. The day after a young black man got beat up in a parking garage, the scene caught by a quick photojournalist (I can’t imagine how sore he is). The day after a stunned mom learned from reporters that her son had been arrested for plowing his car into a crowd of pedestrians (she was in complete shock).

Before social media and the prevalence of pop culture, it was a lot easier to enforce whatever ideologies you wanted your child to follow. But as globalization increased, this changed. Young people became increasingly exposed to the rest of the world. Today, their ideologies and values no longer find a basis in what their priest or imam preaches but in

“Jesus has a body but the Father and Spirit do not. Discuss.” One of my acquaintances posted this on social networking recently, provoking a number of responses. One person wondered if Christ had always had physical form. The discussion spun and doubled back, spiraled and swung. And, as it happens, it matters. Frequently theology – especially Trinitarian theology – is