Last January, a new professor wrote with a little conundrum. A student scored a 27% on his final, realized that he might fail the course as a result, and called the professor three weeks later to plead for mercy –…
Anecdotally at least, it seems that bad memories of our past sins afflict Christians more than many other issues. It’s this difficulty that accounts for a large portion of the circumstances that bring Christians and non-christians to the aid of…
Lately, I’ve been swamped with temporary though important projects consuming my time and attention. Feeling guilty about delaying or limiting focus on more regular needs, I recalled a booklet in a seminary class: Tyranny of the Urgent, by Charles E.…
Egeria’s Travels One day in the fourth century, a woman with time and means left for a three-year tour of Biblical places. In her accurately detailed account, she says nothing about herself. We only know that her name…
As we begin a new year many of us will talk about new adventures we want to take, new goals we would like to accomplish, new relationships we would like to build, and new opportunities we would like to be…
The story of the flight of Katie von Bora from her convent and her arrival at Wittenberg, where she eventually married Martin Luther, is well-known. Few are acquainted with the person who engineered the flight, Ursula von Münsterberg, granddaughter of…
Byang Kato and the Universal Nature of the Historical Gospel During the second half of the twentieth century, many African nations declared their independence from the European countries that had ruled them. In 1960 alone, the so-called “African year,”…
Have you ever heard people say, I just can’t help myself!? We live in a culture where we often blame shift – to other people, to our circumstances, or to some aspect of ourselves which we think provides an excuse…
There is much more to grace than meets the eye. Indeed, to borrow and slightly tweak the title of a song made famous by Bing Crosby in 1955, ‘Grace is a many splendored thing’. Although we instinctively link it to…
