Blog

The morning’s sky was partly cloudy above the mountain trail.  Sunshine slanted between the dark clouds, creating ponds of light among the leafy elms. From the shadows I approached one of those ponds as if about to walk on water, my footsteps expectant but also perhaps a little tentative.  

A girl in her mid-teens sprints past me on the sidewalk where I load a bed frame into a truck outside my house in Oakland, California. She isn’t out for a jog; she runs like her life depends on it.

David Wells, in his essay for the Perspectives Reader, “Prayer: Rebelling Against the Status Quo,” claims that our prayers are limp not because we don’t know how to pray, but that we don’t understand the true nature of prayer.

Imagine a kindergartener looking solemnly at a plate of broccoli. Now imagine hearing a father’s instructing voice, “In our family, we do things we don’t like.”

All across the United States, Latino student enrollment has increased. This recent report by the Pew Hispanic Center detailed a 24% spike in Hispanic college enrollment—in one year.

Heart transplant patients understand the concept of losing life to find life. For eighteen years I was a critical-care nurse specialist.

Last Saturday Jeremy Lin was an unknown, sitting at the end of the Knicks bench in Madison Square Garden and wondering if his dream of playing in the NBA was about to evaporate like a mist.

The Super Bowl has already morphed from the premiere football attraction to a showcase for commercial creativity, at least in the minds of some fans.

I don’t know if everyone can say that they work with people who are changing the world. I can. I work with students who partner with God in bringing the truth of the gospel to their dorm communities, their apartment complexes, their classes, their intramural teams, their friends—to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and to campuses around the globe.

It never would have occurred to my parents to select readings for our family story time that reflected the Christian year. They were unfamiliar with it, as was I for many years. For example, in my senior year of college, my literary-minded apartment-mate proposed throwing a Twelfth Night party à la Shakespeare.