A little boy’s father had been killed in the Iraq War before the boy had ever known him. All he had was a picture of his father, which was placed on an end table in the living room right under the light. One day he said to his mother: “I… To access this post,...
When Mary visited Elizabeth’s home in the Judean hills, it was a 70 mile trip on roads filled with residents and transients, bandits and soldiers. But this Jordan road also passed some towns famous in Israelite history: Shechem, where Abram and Sarai built an altar....
“Let me not wrap, stack, box, bag, tie, gag, bundle, seal, keep Christmas. Christmas kept is liable to mold. Let me give Christmas away, unwrapped by exuberant armfuls. Let me share, dance, live Christmas unpretentiously, merrily, responsibly with overflowing hands,...
“From the Christian point of view there is no special problem about Christmas in a prison cell. For many people in this building it will probably be a more sincere and genuine occasion than in places where nothing but the name is kept. That misery, suffering, poverty,...
Fyodor” Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov that beauty is “mysterious as well as terrible. God and the Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man [humanity].” The preacher doesn’t just visit that “battlefield” and report periodically from...
[Ed. note—Jaime was a close friend and colleague who served in the Western Pennsylvania Conference of the United Methodist Church. She died tragically last year, and this Christmas poem was one of the last things she sent me. I don’t know when she wrote it, but I send...
