Do you make New Year’s resolutions? I have in the past, but they’ve been unrealistic and somewhat discouraging after the first week. No chocolate until I get down to a certain weight? Who am I kidding?! I’ve decided to make some realistic changes instead. Write daily in a gratitude journal. Read the daily entry in […]
The Shack
I thought I could avoid this little chat altogether until I read Katherine Jeffrey’s review of The Shack in Books & Culture, January/February 2010. You can read it here. Jeffrey was brief and fair on the literary merit of The Shack. The book is not beautifully written, but then the message is not in the […]
Is Religion About War or Peace?
I don’t like the word religion. It has different meanings–often damaging and misconstrued. Today I’m posing a question that nags at me quite a bit. If we were really living what Jesus taught, we’d be employing uncomfortable forms of living–ways of behaving that are so counterintuitive that as of now, we simply disregard them, don’t […]
Gospel of Glee
A few months back, I read a couple of the winning scripts of a well-known Christian screenplay contest. My aim was to figure out if I could write one. My decision was that I couldn’t. Now, before you jump to conclusions and assume I’m against all “Christian” movies, I’m not. But there’s a difference between […]
The Practice of Gratitude
Today is a day of gifts. Right before we left for the sunny Caribbean, I heard a very simple, yet remarkable podcast with Oprah and Sarah Ban Breathnach, the author of several Simple Abundance books (for years, I’ve had the Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort of Joy, but have never read it). Sarah was […]