I write from a position of privilege. I'm at my desk, typing on a computer hooked up to the internet, the lifeline for many who now work at home. I'm able to do my job, teaching students through videos and…

As I write this, my two teenagers are “zooming” their classmates and friends and working away at the assignments their teachers have given them during this period of online learning. Life has changed for us drastically in the last week…

Before my last semester of full-time college teaching was derailed by a virus, I had been teaching – for about the fortieth time – my course on American Religious Thought to a lively class of undergraduate students at Central College.…

Some years back, before we even had The Twelve yet I think, I wrote an article in Perspectives on a strangely powerful benediction that Neal Plantinga and I had been using for some years.  Now seems a particularly apt moment…

Was the Lord Jesus immune? From illness? Was he invulnerable to sickness during the days that he walked with us upon the earth? When Our Lord touched people to heal them, was he safe from infection? Is that why he…

Luke 15:11-32 The shame of it all. We were all shamed by the request Jacob made to his father. The entire household was embarrassed by this self-centered request from this ungrateful son. With this impertinent request, the boy proclaimed his…

Years ago, when I was revising a novel, Romey's Place, I didn't know how it should end. What I knew when I'd started the major revision was that I was off in a new direction, writing a different story really because…

It’s Lent, and like everyone else, I’m wondering how much I should worry about COVID-19, aka the novel coronavirus. More than that, though, this season there is a slow, dark, and persistent understanding that I live in a ghetto, and…

Last Friday, I watched out my office window as children burst out of the doors of their school to board the buses for what my second grader is calling a “really, really big spring break.” The night before, at 11…