History, Real Life and Faith
We observe Good Friday every year with the dramatic Tenebrae service. This is a repost because the service is so meaningful to me and others. Here is how we experienced the Tenebrae service several years ago. From the Latin for shadows or darkness, Tenebrae is an ancient service that underscores the solemnity of Jesus’s last day on earth as a man….
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Many years ago, a school friend wrote with a challenging question: “How’s your writing going?” She penned (literally) her letter from San Francisco where she worked for Mother Jones Magazine. I read her letter while sitting on a rock wall above my garden in Connecticut while my toddlers rolled around the driveway on their big wheels tricycles. She meant her…
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Why did Jesus raise Lazarus of Bethany from the dead? The story has come up in my life three times this week and since this is about the time it happened nearly two thousand years ago, I thought it worth examining. You probably know the story (found in John 11): Jesus and his disciples were out on the eastern side of…
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Who should make the rules? A scientist friend has been thinking about the question for most of a week as he reflects on a recent talk by Andrew McAfee, author of The Second Machine Age. The scientist’s thoughts are interesting, and so I am turning this blog post over to him. Thank you, scientist friend! Artificial intelligence (AI) has interested me…
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Here’s the deal: I both hate German U-boats and I admire them. It’s a real problem when I’m watching a submarine movie like Das Boot. I keep switching sides. It made reading Dead Wake by Erik Larson troubling. Sinking the RMS Lusitania was a terrible war crime. But Captain Walther Schweiger, the commanding officer of that U-20 U-boat, was so clever, and the odds were…
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This year’s Caldecott award went to a picture book that tells the true story behind a novel: Finding Winnie. A charming story about the author’s great-grandfather. Finding Winnie describes how he adopted a bear while traveling by troop train from Winnepeg, Canada, to a port from which they sailed to England in the early days of World War I. The novel?…
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