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This impulse can be hard to quantify, mainly because thinking about it makes us uncomfortable. But it's pictured well in a disturbing practice currently employed by the Nigerian judicial system in western Africa.

The country of Niger has an established police and criminal justice system—one of the remnants of its days as a French colony. There are Nigerian police officers and judges, as well ...

My son, Aaron, was five or six when he began asking me, "What does God's voice sound like?" I didn't know how to answer.

A few years later, Aaron went off to his first junior high camp. In the middle of the week, I went up with another pastor at Mosaic to see our kids. Aaron, I learned, had started to assault another kid but had been held back by his friends. He was unrepentant, wanted to leave camp, ...

I can't live Jesus' life and Jesus knows that, but he says: You can ask me to come and live my life in you.

I'll give you a picture of this. Nancy and I were in a part of the country we had never been before. We were going to be driving on obscure back roads, so we got a rental car, and the guy at the counter said to me, "Along with this car, if you want, you can also get a GPS system." Have you ever ...

The Color Purple, based on Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, depicts life in the rural South in the early 1900s.

Shug Avery has lived a rebellious life and broken her father's heart by following her dream of becoming a nightclub singer. Pastor Avery, fearing that acknowledging his daughter would be viewed as endorsing her lifestyle, has refused to speak to her for years.

On a summer Sunday ...

I confess: when my parents tried to impress on my two brothers and me the importance and the intricacies of Advent observance, I could hardly keep from rolling my eyes. In a country that spends its cold Decembers in hot pursuit of food, presents, and parties, the historical niceties of an ancient liturgical season seemed … well … irrelevant.

These days, on the other side of an evangelical ...

Life involves making lots of decisions about right and wrong, and God has given us a conscience to help us make those decisions. Unfortunately the human conscience doesn't always give accurate readings. It's like a thermometer in an urban area. If you put an outdoor thermometer on the back of your house, and your house sits beside an expressway or a blacktop parking lot or another building, your thermometer ...

Joshua Bell emerged from the Metro and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript—a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money and began to play.

For the ...

George Whitefield, the great 18th century evangelist, spoke these words at a funeral service:

Do you think any farmer would have a crop of corn next year unless he plowed now? You may as well expect a crop of corn on unplowed ground as a crop of grace until the soul is convinced of its being undone without a Savior. That is the reason we have so many mushroom converts, so many persons that are always ...

Scientist and skeptic Richard Dawkins, in his book River Out of Eden, explains: "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."

Skeptic Magazine interviewed Dawkins and asked if his world view was the same as Shakespeare's Macbeth, that life is "a tale told by an idiot, ...

In their book Dangerous Intersections, Jay Dennis and Jim Henry write:

Prayer changes things. That’s what a church in Phoenix discovered after the pastor asked members to randomly choose 80 people from the telephone book. He then requested daily prayer for each person for 90 days. At the same time, he asked members to choose another 80 names from the directory, but the second list was simply laid ...