What the heck is going on in Syria? If you are like me, you have a problem keeping all the players straight, and the unfamiliar Arab names don’t help. Thankfully, the Syrian President has a relatively easy name to remember, Bashar al-Assad, but keeping track of who’s who and which side they’re on is a real challenge. Frankly, even when I can keep track, I’m very skeptical that I am getting anything close to ...

I hate Abercrombie and Fitch. It all started a few years ago. A member of my youth group worked at one of their stores in a suburb of Chicago. I was minorly troubled that she was employed at the store. But what really flamed my loathing for Abercrombie was when they asked her to model their clothes for their catalogue. She told me about their offer and I responded in the only way an over-protective youth pa ...

On Tuesday, Angelina Jolie went public with the news that she had a preventative mastectomy and we can’t stop talking about her. Which is nothing new – talking about Angelina is an American pastime. We have opinions – strong opinions – about Brad and Jennifer and Billy Bob, about her international adoptions, her humanitarian causes and sometimes we even talk about her movies. We enjoy loving and hating her ...

Mother’s Day is not primarily a call for sentimental reflection about our mothers. It’s a call to disarm. It’s a call to nonviolence. It’s a call to follow the God of nonviolent love, not the violent Caesars of our world. Finally, Mother’s Day is a call to peace, justice, and love for all of creation. Only when our lives are patterned in that way can we live out Howe’s dream to “solemnly take counsel with e ...

I love Anne Lamott. I have a spiritual crush on her because she says things about prayer like this: Prayer is taking the chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up. The opposite may be true: We may not be able to get it together until after we show up in such miserable shape. That’s all anyone really needs to know about Anne L ...

A wonderful production of the play Next Fall by Geoffrey Nauffts is currently being staged by the AstonRep company at the BoHo Theatre in Chicago. My apologies to out-of-towners who won’t have the opportunity to see the show, because it is blessed with a gifted ensemble, headed by Mark Jacob Chaitin and Ryan Hamlin in the lead roles. Hamlin plays Adam, who, unlike the Biblical Adam, has no relationship with ...

Can politics serve the common good? That’s one of the big questions in Jim Wallis’s latest book On God’s Side. It is the right question to ask because American politics seems irredeemably mired in the blame game. I, along with many other young people, was hoping for a new kind of politics five years ago when we helped to elect Barack Obama. We thought we were making that change for a new kind of politics. Y ...

How will the human species continue to evolve? That was the question posed earlier in the week by CBS’s Sunday Morning in a segment called “The Future of Evolution.” But before looking to the future of human evolution, Sunday Morning briefly examined its history. This was a wise direction for the segment, in my opinion, because before we speculate on what we’re evolving into, we need to know what we’ve evol ...

In his book On God’s Side: What Religion forgets and Politics Hasn’t Learned about Serving the Common Good, Jim Wallis calls out his fellow men: It’s a constant story line involving powerful men in politics, sports, business, and even religion: they behave with utter disregard for the dignity and humanity of women, using and abusing them at will, and somehow believe that they are entitled to do so…What has ...

Can you be a "good Christian" and support LGBT rights and same-sex marriage? When NBA player Jason Collins announced this week that he's gay -- the first active, professional American male athlete ever to do so -- the public reaction was overwhelmingly positive. ESPN on Jason Collins & Scripture Writers like ESPN's Tim Keown noted just how un-noteworthy and "normal" the announcement is. "It's a big worl ...