Dead Man Walking is based on a true story about Sister Helen Prejean (played by Susan Sarandon), a nun who agrees to offer spiritual counsel to Matthew Poncelet, a man on death row. This angers Mr. and Mrs. Percy, the parents of the teenage girl Poncelet murdered, as they can't understand how she could sympathize with someone who committed such a savage act.

In one scene, Sister Helen is sitting with ...

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—)

Have you heard about Pocket God? It's one of the top-selling video game applications for Apple's iPhone. Here's the game description found on iTunes:

What kind of god would you be? Benevolent or vengeful? Play Pocket God and discover the answer within yourself. On a remote island, you are the all-powerful god that rules over the primitive islanders. You can bring new life, and then take it away just ...

Ghassan Thomas leads one of the few public churches that emerged [in Baghdad] after Saddam Hussein was toppled. His congregation erected a sign on their building that said "Jesus Is the Light of the World," but the church was raided by bandits who left behind a threat on a piece of cardboard. It read: "Jesus is not the light of the world, Allah is, and you have been warned." The note was signed "The ...

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—)

This past summer, a friend of mine named Greg put together a mini high school reunion when he went back to Indiana to visit his parents. He hadn't seen many of his classmates in over 17 years. Needless to say, they had a riot reliving their glory days and finding out what was currently going on in everyone's life.

As the night was winding down, Greg noticed that his friend Debbie was getting teary-eyed, ...

Several workplace-related studies in 2008 suggest that the majority of working Americans aren't all that fond of who they work with.

• When asked if a colleague has ever tried to make them look bad, 50 percent of respondents said yes; 48 percent said no; 2 percent said they didn't know.
  
  
• When asked to identify which causes more stress at work—co-workers or workload—51 percent of respondents said co-workers, while 49 percent said workload.
  
  

In her book Living Beyond Yourself: Exploring the Fruit of the Spirit, author and speaker Beth Moore recalls a particularly insightful moment in her life:

I will never forget watching an evening talk show featuring the story of the parents and killer of a young college student. The killer was his best friend. The weapon was high alcohol content inside a speeding automobile. …

What made this ...

In The Interpreter, Sylvia Broom (Nicole Kidman) is an interpreter for the United Nations who overhears an assassination attempt on the President of the African nation of Mantobo, Edmond Zuwanie. Sylvia was born in Mantobo, and Zuwanie was responsible for the deaths of her parents when she was an adolescent.

When the Secret Service question Sylvia about what she has overheard, they doubt her story ...

One of my most painful leadership lessons came shortly after I graduated from seminary and began to work in a church as a full-time pastor and leader. I was asked to be on a committee that worked with incoming seminary students who were training for full-time ministry. One of our responsibilities was to determine if students had financial needs.

At my first meeting, this group looked over four requests ...