For reasons I cannot quite remember (perhaps the guidebooks or the guide himself told us it wasn't much to get worked up about), I wasn't excited to visit the birthplace of Christ [while on a study tour of Israel in the summer of 2000]. I recall wishing we could spend our time in Jerusalem, but I didn't have a choice. If the group was going to Bethlehem, I was, too.

We walked through the dusty streets ...

In an interview with Carolyn Arends, singer and songwriter Sara Groves explains why she begins her 2007 album Tell Me What You Know, which primarily addresses social issues, with "Song for My Sons":

I wondered how my kids would finish the statement, "My mother always said … " What would they say? Besides, "You get what you get," "Don't throw a fit," and "That doesn't fit in your nose"? I would ...

In his book The Pressure's Off, psychologist Larry Crabb uses a story from his childhood to illustrate our need to delight in God through adversity:

One Saturday afternoon, I decided I was a big boy and could use the bathroom without anyone's help. So I climbed the stairs, closed and locked the door behind me, and for the next few minutes felt very self-sufficient.

Then it was time to leave. I couldn't ...

Catch a Fire tells the real life story of South African Patrick Chamusso, an oil refinery worker who is falsely arrested by the country's anti-terrorism police. Patrick and his wife Precious are jailed and brutally tortured under the leadership of Colonel Nic Vos. To spare his wife, Patrick gives a false confession. Though he is later found innocent, he joins the African National Congress, an outlawed ...

In May of 2006, John Allen Muhammad was convicted in Maryland for the murder of six people as part of his "Beltway Sniper" reign of terror in October of 2002. Muhammad had already been sentenced to death in Virginia for murders there. However, during the trial, some frightening information was revealed about what Muhammad would have done if he had evaded capture.

According to Lee Boyd Malvo, Muhammad's ...

According to a poll conducted in January 2006 by the Terror Free Tomorrow organization, humanitarian aid is a very effective way to improve how Muslim countries view the United States of America.

In May of 2003, research indicated that only 15 percent of people in Indonesia—the world's most populous Muslim nation—had a favorable view of the U.S. However, the country was later devastated by ...

The encounter between Ashley Smith and accused murderer Brian Nichols resulted in Smith counseling her captor using Rick Warren's book, The Purpose Driven Life. Commenting on the incident in Time magazine, Andrew Sullivan compared this woman—unable to care for her young child—and this monster-like man, writing:

These people weren't saints. Grace arrives, unannounced, in lives that least ...

On Monday, people fought against praying in schools. On Tuesday, you would have been hard pressed to find a school where someone was not praying.

On Monday, people tried to separate each other by race, sex, color, and creed. On Tuesday, they were holding hands.

On Monday, people fought against having the 10 commandments on government property. On Tuesday, the same people said, "God help us all," while ...

At the September 15, 2001, satellite broadcast of "America Prays," author Max Lucado read the following prayer that he wrote in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on America.

Dear Lord, we're still hoping we'll wake up. We're still hoping we'll open a sleepy eye and think, What a horrible dream.

But we won't, will we, Father? What we saw was not a dream. Planes did gouge towers. Flames ...

In March 1995 followers of a Japanese doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo (meaning "Supreme Truth") released deadly sarin gas into the Tokyo subway system, killing 12 commuters and sickening thousands. The eccentric leader of the cult and instigator of the attack, Shoko Asahara, has been imprisoned since then, but the cult lives on, even under intense governmental scrutiny. In fact, it has grown, in ...