After the long “green season” Advent is finally upon us! Today marks the beginning of that season in the church year when we anticipate and await the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In the words of the apostle Paul that we read this morning, we “wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 1:7). We do not only await his coming as the Christ child...
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One day while watching robotic Lincoln move at Disneyland, I noticed the coat draping his form and wondered about it. What happened to the frockcoat?
As a middle aged man, I realized that they were designed to flatter aging forms. The cut off jacket of most suits seems fitting for young men eager to show off their athletic builds while the frockcoat appeared to hide a multit...
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Mickey Mouse is eighty-three.
I suspect that with jazz, Lincoln, and scientific advances, Disney animation will be remembered as a cultural gift from America to the world. Other nations do animation well (see Japan), but if America was the Columbus of animation. Others may have done it first, but after Disney nobody could ignore it.
Mickey Mouse paid the bills for Walt an...
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This review is not about Glenn Beck.
Whatever you think of Glenn Beck, many of the parents of my students listen to him on the radio, subscribe to his television network (GBTV), and read his books.
In this new book Being George Washington, from now on BGW, Beck engages in an old classical tradition. He uses historical example to teach an important lesson. Glenn Beck, like...
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If you move the organ from the left to the right of the platform in some churches, some will accuse you of betraying the Church. I know because it happened to a friend. If five years ago you thought your business should buy land, but now think it imprudent, many will wonder at your lack of moral constancy.
Some confuse a mind locked in concrete with character and flexibility...
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Today is Black Friday, a kind of Good Friday for retailers. On this day, many businesses redeem their year through the suffering of overworked employees paying for the marketing mistakes of the entire corporation.
Consumerism is so awful that it might spoil the holiday. Oddly, the very sort of Christian that urges me to watch horror movies and find Christ in them or who righ...
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Today is Thanksgiving and if you are reading this either you are bad or lonely.
You are bad if there is family happiness to be had or people to be helped and you are not. You may, however, be at the end—the jollity of the day is hard.
I love the Holidays, but oddly that means I deeply understand hatred or disappointment in them. They promise so much and seem to deliver ...
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The artist known as Phoebe Age Nine has been working on this piece for a while. Every few days her friends, fans, and gallery agent have been asking, "Is the Cat Card done yet?" The terse but unworried answer has been, "Not yet. There's still space on it."
We were beginning to worry that the Cat Card would be to Phoebe Age Nine what The Rose was to Jay DeFeo: an unfinishable...
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George Whitefield and John Wesley, the two titans of the evangelical awakening of the eighteenth century, are not paired often enough. The people who write about them or quote them tend to be strongly attracted to one and averse to the other. As a result, most assessments of the two men have a tendency to use a "hermeneutics of admiration" for their favorite, and a felt need t...
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Gratitude is free.
That's not because it doesn't cost anything for us to become more grateful people. It does cost us. Nor because we can idly expect it to be handed around by everyone. We can't (or shouldn't). No, it's free because it's unnecessary. We can't demand it of each other. It's superfluous, extraneous, gracious. Free.
Pause, and imagine demanded gratitude. ...
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Work in a University and you will meet few people who love cars. As a boy in West Virginia, I frequently met people who were "car people." One fellow kept a car for years in a garage, because he loved it. I never actually saw it, but heard of its magnificence.
In my experience, there are few car people at college.
At worst, cars are status symbols. Have an electric car as...
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Mitt Romney is a conservative.
Four years ago Romney ran as a conservative and pulled out of the race with a dignified and eloquent defense of the conservative worldview. He has spent the last four years working hard for conservative candidates and ideas.
To read some conservatives, this successful businessman is a closet socialist. This pious family man is hiding secre...
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