My grandparents lived in Salem, Arkansas, which was an all-white community in the Ozark foothills. One day in the early 1960s, Grandpa was strolling across the town square on his lunch break from his job at the post office. As he walked by the bus depot, a friendly voice called out to him. …

Glancing to his left, Grandpa found himself looking into the face of a man he hadn't seen for almost ...

Early in his career, many had hoped A. N. Wilson, a brilliant philosopher, would become the next C. S. Lewis. But as a young man, he began to wonder how much of the Easter story he accepted. By his thirties, he had lost all religious belief and publicly repudiated his Christian faith, becoming an atheist. He soon embraced the role of a harsh, cynical critic of Christianity and any faith in God at ...

Muckraking is not gospel work. Witch-hunting is not gospel work. Shaming the outcast is not gospel work. Forgiving sin is gospel work.

— U.S. pastor, scholar, author, and poet (1932—)

After successfully separating numerous Siamese twins and continuing to refine the techniques of several complicated surgeries, Dr. Ben Carson has become known throughout the world as a premiere brain surgeon. What many do not know is that because of an uncontrollable temper as a child, Dr. Carson's career was almost over before it began. In his book Take the Risk, Dr. Carson writes about the day he ...

Fred Winters, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Maryville, Illinois, was shot and killed during a Sunday service on March 8, 2009, by a troubled young man. A week after the tragic event, his wife, Cindy Winters, was interviewed by Julie Chen of CBS's Early Show. When asked about her husband's alleged killer, Terry Sedlacek, Winters spoke only a message of forgiveness—a message quite fitting ...

On October 22, 1996, in St. Martins-in-the-Fields Church in central London, a congregation of some two hundred people, described the next day by the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph as "admirers," gathered to celebrate the life of the famous twentieth-century English novelist Sir Kingsley Amis. The paper described it as "a secular service: no hymns or prayers, just a lot of laughter." During ...

Millions have seen Nick Ut's Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc (pronounced "fuke"). On June 8, 1972, a napalm bomb was dropped on her village. Phuc, who was just nine-years-old at the time, ran crying from her hiding place in the village temple in Vietnam. Ut's picture shows Phuc's arms outstretched in terror and pain, skin flapping from her legs as she cried, "Nong qua! Nong qua!" ...

Psychologists have found an intriguing way to study what it is that we really like and dislike. It's called "affective priming." They print a word over a bouncing dot on a computer screen. If people's response is positive, they push any key with their left hand; if negative—any key with their right.

Too discover our deeper responses, researchers will use subliminal stimulation. They'll print ...

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Peter Wood, in his book A Bee in the Mouth, writes that a sure sign of America's problem with anger is the tone of its politics. "For the first time in our political history, declaring absolute hatred for one's opponent has become a sign not of sad excess, but of good character."

As prevalent as it is, anger is a bit mysterious; it can be either one's greatest liability or one's greatest asset. ...

To triumph fully, evil needs two victories, not one. The first victory happens when an evil deed is perpetrated; the second victory, when evil is returned. After the first victory, evil would die if the second victory did not infuse it with new life.

—Miroslav Volf, Croation theologian (1956—)