Commentaries

Stephen Hawking died March 14th at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76. Some of his intuitions remind us that everyone gets part of the story right.

“The trick is not to arrange a festival,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, “but to find people who can enjoy it.” He recognized we live in an age of pseudo-festivals.

Some see sacred/secular as good/bad. In the lives of two famous runners, Roger Bannister and Eric Liddell, we’re reminded it’s a false dichotomy.

Roughly 80 percent of teens in evangelical church youth groups will abandon the faith after two years in college. Might seem like a dark trend, but John Seel sees hope.

You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Frederick Douglass, a Marylander, learned this from the Clapham circle. I’m a Marylander. I need to learn this lesson.

Nick Foles, this year’s Super Bowl MVP, wants to be a youth pastor when he retires. What would you advise Nick to advise youth who want to play football?

“The centre cannot hold” is how William Butler Yeats described the world in 1919. He was right about the world but wrong about the centre. The right one can hold.

A reader last week asked for concrete ideas on how churches could collaborate. I have a few. So does a friend of mine, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy—an institution that instills collaboration.

In business, diversity and inclusion is overused and nearly meaningless. It’s a problem the faith community could help solve. But we’d have to recognize our ticket in.

Critics claim time spent on Facebook is harmful. Mark Zuckerberg takes this seriously. He’s changed Facebook’s mission to promote “time well spent.” That’s a ray of hope.