The ancient Celts were agrarian people. They lived close to the soil and relied on favorable tides and seasons to grow their crops. Farming was done entirely by hand and life was hard. The people who worked the land needed a way into prayer that...
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was something of a renaissance man. His output was most impressive, almost superhuman. He was a successful politician (a member of the Netherlands Parliament and Prime Minister from 1901-1905), an erudite theologian (an...
My grandson Luke enjoys baseball trivia, so I periodically send him obscure questions about major league baseball. He has become a student of the game, so it's really hard to come up with questions he can't answer. Here's one he didn't know--name...
Prayers are sometimes answered in unimaginable ways. Take the story of Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). He wasn't particularly successful as a poet. He published only a few poems during his lifetime. Nor was he effective as a priest. People in...
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) spent the first thirty-one years of his life doing what brilliant people do. He formulated Pascal's theorem of geometry at sixteen. He created the first calculator at nineteen. He invented the syringe, the hydraulic press...
John Frederick Denison (F. D.) Maurice (1805-1872) was a contemporary of Karl Marx. They shared a mutual concern for working people. You may recall that Marx called religion "the opiate of the people." F. D. differentiated Marx's view of religion...
Mary Byrne was a twenty-five-year-old university student doing research in a Dublin, Ireland library in 1905. She discovered a rare fourteenth-century copy of an ancient Irish poem that she translated into English for the first time. Most scholars...
If you ever end up in a feud among family or friends, you're likely to get attacked from both sides. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said, "Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by traffic from...
What became of the virtue of humility? It is being passed over today in total silence. Pride, which used to be ranked as one of the "seven deadly sins," has kicked humility to the curb. It has become in one author's words, "a weakness or character...
Slavery was considered standard operating procedure in the ancient world. It was deemed necessary to make the mighty Roman Empire economy go. Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 335-ca. 395) was a rare dissenting voice who railed against slavery in sermons and...
Christian Riedel attended a conference in 1934 for Lutheran pastors in Michigan. He stayed with his cousin who showed him an old Bible he had found with other discarded books. Christian recognized Johann Sebastian Bach's (1685-1750) original...
Americans have an aversion to suffering. All pain must be medicated, and suffering must be avoided at all costs. Yet who are we kidding? Suffering is inevitable and comes indiscriminately to all. Our spiritual forebears were realistic about...
As I reference the ancient church in Rome, put aside any notion you have of a glorious cathedral or ornate basilica. The third century church in Rome was an assortment of house churches, supervised by an overseer called a bishop, forerunner to what...
I was twenty-five when I entered Gordon Conwell Seminary. Three years of campus ministry in tandem with my wife Chris showed me how little I knew of the Bible, Christian theology and leading a church. My introductory New Testament class was taught...
No preacher was available to deliver the sermon at London's St. Magnus the Martyr Church on Sunday January 29, 1569. Whether the scheduled preacher was ill, or a no-show remains unclear. Miles Coverdale (1488-1569) had been honorably retired from...
The first prayer of the Continental Congress was offered in 1774. The English Parliament had just passed the Intolerable Acts to punish Bostonians for their anti-British sentiment. The American colonies responded by convening the first Continental...
Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius (what a name! ca. 250-325) was born and bred an atheist. The Roman Emperor Diocletian appointed him professor of Latin and rhetoric in a Greek city. Sometime late in his life, Lactantius became a follower of...
I have long appreciated the writing of Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007) and particularly her words about prayer. So, you can imagine my surprise recently when I read that her highly acclaimed novel A Wrinkle in Time has consistently appeared on the...