In a 2007 article for Christianity Today, Jenell Williams Paris, a mother to infant twins, explained how motherhood cultivates the spiritual discipline of self-denial every single day. Naps for little ones dictate the reality of a nap for the caretaker. A baby's cry for milk tears a carefully constructed schedule to pieces. Sickness demands a steady healing hand. The challenge for the mother, Paris ...

When researchers at the University of Texas at Austin asked 2,000 people why they have sex, there were plenty of answers—237, to be precise. The most popular answer given by those surveyed was that they felt an attraction for the other person. Others said sex was a chief way to feel closer to someone else or to show someone how much they are loved. Many simply said they had sex because "it feels ...

In a Time magazine essay, Charles Krauthammer tells why he does not support stem-cell research "from embryos created purposely and wantonly for nothing but use by science":

When I was 22 and a first-year medical student, I suffered a spinal-cord injury. I have not walked in 32 years. I would be delighted to do so again. But not at any price. I think it is more important to bequeath to my son a world ...

The movie Waking Ned Divine begins in the cozy living room of an elderly Irish couple. In the background we hear a television announcer informing the audience that the big jackpot lottery numbers are about to be announced. The husband, Jackie, settles into a comfortable brown chair in front of the television. We can see his wife in the background doing paperwork in the kitchen. Once Jackie is happily ...

A small boy was writing a letter to God about the Christmas presents he badly wanted. "I've been good for six months now," he wrote.

But after a moment's reflection he crossed out "six months" and wrote "three." After a pause, that was crossed out, and he put "two weeks." There was another pause, and that was crossed out too.

He got up from the table and went over to the little nativity scene that ...

The difference between manipulation and leadership is motive.

The tongue is our most powerful weapon of manipulation. A frantic stream of words flows from us because we are in a constant process of adjusting our public image. We fear so deeply what we think other people see in us that we talk in order to straighten out their understanding. If I have done some wrong thing (or even some right thing that I think you may misunderstand) and discover that you know ...

Our society is not a community radiant with the love of Christ, but a dangerous network of domination and manipulation in which we can easily get entangled and lose our soul. The basic question is whether we ministers of Jesus Christ have not already been so deeply molded by the seductive powers of our dark world that we have become blind to our own and other people's fatal state and have lost our ...

False teachers invite people to come to the Master's table because of what's on it, not because they love the Master.

The current phrase "worship experience" merely serves to confuse us. Those who worship with the expectation that the act ought to generate certain experiences for them will undoubtedly have many experiences. But they will probably not be the sorts of experiences that Christian worship offers to those who seek only the face of God through song and prayer, preaching and sacrament.

Liturgists can generate ...