Elliot Huck, a 14-year-old from Bloomington, Indiana, decided to skip a preliminary to the National Spelling Bee. Though he placed 45th out of more than 250 spellers in last year's competition and was a favored to go again, he felt convicted to stay home this time around. More precisely, he felt convicted to stay in church. The 2007 Bloomington Herald-Times championship was held on March 4, 2007—a ...

A priest was coming back to his rectory one evening in the dark when he was accosted by a robber who pulled a gun on him and demanded, "Your money or your life!"

As the priest reached his hand into his coat pocket, the robber saw his Roman collar and said: "I see you're a priest. Never mind, you can go."

The priest, surprised at this unexpected show of piety, tried to reciprocate by offering the robber ...

Mark McMinn makes the following observation in his book, Why Sin Matters:

When we see ourselves as "pretty good," we misunderstand the gravity of sin and our desperate need for grace. We place ourselves above others, become their judges, and give them the power to disappoint us.

A physicist friend uses this analogy: Each of us is like a light bulb. One shines with 50 watts of holiness, another has only ...

It came by way of two ruptured lumbar discs. The doctor prescribed six weeks of total rest. The horrible pain prevented me from lying in bed. Those weeks were spent on my back on the floor. My eyes didn't focus well, due to the pain-killers and muscle relaxants, so I could scarcely read.

I was of no use to the church, I thought. So I asked my wife to bring me the pictorial directory. I decided I'd ...

...

Nolan returns to his apartment and recounts the events of the day to his girlfriend, Grace (Jennifer Aniston). He is angry with his boss, his life, the injustice of the world, and most of all Bruce is angry with God.

After listening with concern, Grace gently responds, "Well, thank God you're all right."

Nolan snorts, "God…yeah, let's thank God, shall we?" Dripping with bitterness and mock ...

[Jonathan] Edwards first encountered God in an intensely experiential way while reading 1 Timothy 1:17: "Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory for ever and ever." He was overcome with "a sense of the glory of the Divine Being; a new sense, quite different from anything I ever experienced before."

The only language that seemed adequate, as he later recorded ...

Country and Western singer Johnny Cash describes his taste in music:

I love songs about horses, railroads, land, judgment day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak, and love. And mother. And God.

I once asked a deeply religious man if he considered himself a truly pious person. He responded that while he aspired to be one, he felt that he fell short in two areas. One of those areas, he said, was his not being a happy enough person to be considered truly pious.

His point was that unhappy religious people reflect poorly on their religion and on their Creator. He was right; in fact, unhappy religious ...

Wendy Kaminer, an avowed agnostic who has authored five books, including, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety, expresses her discomfort with religious beliefs:

Apart from the comfort I might find in religious belief, when I think about the question, "Does God exist?" I put it in the category of things I can't worry about. Questions I can't know the answer ...

It is highly probable that in tomorrow's world Christianity will need to fend for itself either in a secularized social milieu of intellectual atheism that empties the churches or in a society where a religious sense of many coexisting gods saturate civic culture as did ancient paganism.

In the one case, Christian orthodoxy will be charged with espousing the objective existence of a supernatural reality ...