When I gave birth to my first child in 1983 at age 24, I realized about thirty-six hours into this new adventure that babysitting as a young teen, assisting with a pack of deaf Boy Scouts in college, and nannying part-time for a few months when I was first married was not sufficient training for…

Hello, 2014. I see you peeking around the corner, waiting to enter the room. Come on in. Sit a spell. 2013 was just leaving. There’s something about the blank pages of a brand-new calendar that inspires many of us to commit to change. Raise your hand if you’ve ever made a New Year’s resolution:  I…

The recent uproar surrounding charges of plagiarism swirling around some of Mark Driscoll (click here and here) has nearly obscured another story that may have even greater implications for the church – and, ironically, maybe even for Driscoll’s future publishing endeavors. While the late John Howard Yoder’s name is less familiar to mainstream Evangelicals than Driscoll’s, this recent story…

At Christmas, the image of an intact nuclear family is at the center of it all. That image, of a mom, a dad and a baby together forming a circle of love, is mirrored for us each year in dozens of different ways from commercials to Hallmark movies to news stories about people traveling at…

My husband and I took our kids to see the Star of Bethlehem December sky show atChicago’s Adler Planetarium a couple of times during their elementary school years. There was something magical about sitting in the darkened auditorium watching the ceiling glow with twinkle light constellations as a narrator coolly described the possible confluence of planets…

It takes a lot of hard work to work in community to hammer out convictions about how to apply Scripture to our lives. Even if I don’t agree with the particular conclusions of particular church or group, it’s been my experience that the evidence of the hard work often shows in the way in which…