Dear Partner in Preaching, Given the choice, which would you choose, love or justice? I know this is a hard choice, as both are really important. So if you’re anything like me, you understandably want both. And yet every once in while, we are forced to make a choice. And that can feel really, really hard. I think that’s part of what is going on in this quite remarkable parable. You know the contours of this story as well as I do, but lets tarry for a few moments at the climatic moments of the story. Let’s first put ourselves in the place of the workers who were chosen last. Likely they had all but given up hope for work that day and...

Two hundred years ago this day and night, attorney Frank Key – known to us today as Francis Scott Key – thought he was witnessing the end of the American dream. Opposed to the brutality of war and regarding the U. S. endeavor to take on Great Britain as utter foolishness, Key nevertheless volunteered to be part of an emissary to the British to secure the release of a captive. All went well, except that the British, who had already bombed Washington to pieces and now were intent on destroying Baltimore, felt that Key and his party knew too much about their plans and could not be released. And so Key and his companions were kept aboard...

Soul Pancake – one of my all time favorite websites – has launched a new video series, this one on success: what we mean by it, where we see it, how we define it. This last question – how do you define success? – is the topic of the first video they’ve posted. It’s all of 2 and a half minutes and beyond being quite fun – as so many Soul Pancake endeavors are (think “Kid President”!) – it’s a great question for each of us to ask ourselves. Because our definition of success – whether we’ve articulated it consciously or not – shapes decisions about how we spend our time, who we spend our time with, what we’re...

I love big questions. Questions about meaning, existence, purpose. I love big questions. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that I believe I can answer them, just that I love struggling with them. 🙂 That wasn’t always the case, though. When I was a freshman in college and looking at required courses, I shied away from the intro. to philosophy course because I couldn’t imagine spending all my time trying to answer questions to which there are no answers. As a tribute – or, I suppose, a critique, depending on your point of view (though I mean it as a tribute 🙂 ) – to my liberal arts education at Franklin & Marshall College,...

As I was tracking the Apple tech conference yesterday – yes, I’m just that much of an Apple fan/geek – and noticed I was increasingly nonplussed – we all new about the bigger iPhone and had heard for months about the coming Apple Watch – I began to wonder just how longer we’ll care about Apple’s announcements. Perhaps, I thought, Apple’s day in the sun is over and we’re becoming as jaded to their innovations – okay, so they don’t really innovate as much as they take existing platforms to a higher and more beautiful level – as we are to innovations and evolutions in other industries. But then I found myself thinking...