Browse Archives
Check out news and opinion posts across the years
“The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”
"The Two Towers"—like the trilogy's first installment, "The Fellowship of the Ring"—is a massive movie in terms of narrative, production and box office. But the adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's work shines most...
What God Wants for Christmas
There are still lots of things to do between now and Christmas. Unfortunately, many of us are so busy we will miss the person standing between us and Christmas, a man who's pointing us in the direction we need to go:...
Balancing Congregational Care and Congregational Guidance
Congregations are starving for leadership in these challenging days marked by increasingly complex family issues, community and cultural shifts, greater fear and anxiety, and increasing expectations for pastor-led...
Christmas for a Rural Church
In the smaller places, those people with material needs are visible. They are people that we know and see regularly. Demonstrations of love are face to face. Here, we cannot retreat into some gilded ghetto and not deal...
Center for a New American Dream
Many Americans are anxious to simplify their holiday season, and the Center for a New American Dream has a wealth of information to help people focus on family, fun, good food and relaxation rather than just spending...
A Memorable Year of Shame and Vindication: Lest We Forget
The year of our Lord 2002 will be known, in history texts yet to be written, mostly for economic recession, our war against terrorism, and the Bush campaign against Iraq. The church must add to that litany of infamy,...
Whose Water Is It?
My grandfather used to have a gourd dipper that hung on a nail from the back of his house. People who fished in his pond would stop by to tell him what kind of luck they had and to get a refreshing drink of cool water...
Charging Fast-Food Meals Prompts More Spending
McDonald's is making buying a Big Mac easier by allowing consumers to charge their fast-food meals. USNEWS.com reported that the move may be just what the fast-food giant needs to get "consumers to supersize their...
Nature Fights Back in ‘Two Towers’
Director Peter Jackson characterized Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien as "very much anti-control, anti-systems—which partly feeds into his themes about the environment." The role of the Ents—and Treebeard, their...
On the Trail of ‘What Would Jesus Drive?’
We had an audacious goal when we began planning the "What Would Jesus Drive?" (WWJDrive) educational campaign. We hoped that we could help turn transportation into a moral issue in this country. You can judge whether...
Preaching Ethically
Most of us in the church want to assume that the preachers among us do so from Christian motives and by Christian methods. What we find instead is "it ain't necessarily so!" Most of us in the church want to assume that...
Surprised by Christmas
Last year about this time, the year's first snowfall surprised everyone. We were caught off guard, though it was mid-December and weather folks had predicted a snowstorm in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont., where we lived....
‘Two Towers’ Cast and Crew Speak Out on War and Peace, Good and Evil
"Tolkien knows that every few hundred years or so there comes a challenge to a generation where you can lose it all—your way of life, your civilization," said Rhys-Davies. "And if you do not have unity, courage and a...
‘Two Towers’ Features a Grand Gollum
No one was interested in portraying Gollum as a completely evil being. Philippa Boyens, one of the screenwriters, said Tolkien believed that people weren't totally evil, and that the potential for evil existed in...
Is the Incoming Senate Majority Leader a Racist?
Lott has had over 30 years in public life to establish a clear record of opposition to racism and for civil rights. He has demonstrated a pattern of playing the race card. Lott was referring to Thurmond's 1948...
Bruderhof Closes Its Plough Publishing House
Plough Publishing House, for decades the public voice of the New York-based Bruderhof Communities, went on what has been termed a "hiatus" Nov. 14. The Bruderhof, which has 3,000 members living in 10 Christian...
More Americans File for Bankruptcy
Bankruptcy judges have seen a 59 percent increase in caseloads in the past decade, and no new judges have been added to the federal bench since 1992, according to the Washington Post. "The number of bankruptcy filings...
Good News About Injustice: A Witness of Courage in a Hurting World (Youth Edition)
If youth workers will consider the vision that Gary Haugen has put forth in Good News About Injustice—allowing the Scriptures to seep within their hearts and challenge their view of God, humanity and the oppressed—they...
A Call to Prayer for Believers Everywhere
Transforming our festivals of faith into seasons of intercession may help counter the hate and despair that fuels the call to kill. They published a Ramadan prayer guide calling on Christians to pray for the conversion...
The Person Who Was a Message
Media critic Marshall McLuhan said in 1964 that "the medium is the message." He was talking about television. The most important thing about TV, McLuhan suggested, is not the messages it delivers but the way it...
Global Community Honors Carter, Southern Baptists Are Mute
When the world's best known Baptist was named the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, Southern Baptist media and opinion-shapers uttered hardly a word. The Southern Baptist Convention's news service, Baptist...