Years ago I visited one of my kids' pre-school classes. On this particular day, the kids were really excited because the teacher had promised to bring in a real, live rabbit to show them. The kids all gathered on the rug, and she brought in the wire cage, set it down in the middle of the rug, and opened the door so the rabbit could get out. No sooner had she done that then the kids crowded around ...

By any measure, Shane Hamman is a big man. For the 2004 summer Olympics in Athens, Greece, this super-heavy weightlifter weighed a hefty 350 pounds. He boasted a 62-inch chest with biceps just a couple inches shy of two feet in circumference.

Despite the muscle, "America's Strongest Man" could do a standing back flip, dunk a basketball, and squat lift a world record 1,008 pounds.

Nobody's kicking sand ...

In his book The Jesus Revolution, pastor and author Leith Anderson shares a story about the tension that sometimes comes between obeying God and obeying the law of the land. A number of years ago, he and three others were traveling to a Communist country where Christians were regularly being persecuted. They did not have a direct flight to their destination, so they had to stay in a neighboring country ...

The Tuesday night prayer meeting at Brooklyn Tabernacle felt like skydiving into a tornado, exhausting and exhilarating all at once. I'd read about the meeting in Pastor Jim Cymbala's book Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire, but nothing prepared me for the event itself: 3,500 God-hungry people storming heaven for two hours.

Afterward, my friend and I went out to dinner with the Cymbalas. In the course of the meal, ...

My goal, as a Stanford University student, was to start a Bible study in the Sigma Chi fraternity house. For over a year I could get nothing going. Then came my "God-given opportunity disguised as a hassle."

I was rushing to the campus post office to mail some packages before the morning classes let out. A man on the free-speech platform was pointing out specific sins in the lives of people he'd never ...

Fresh from a debate on whether or not humans can be moral without God, author and apologist Dinesh D'Souza offers a few reflections on his sparring partner, Princeton University's Peter Singer, a bioethicist:

Singer is a mild-mannered fellow who speaks calmly and lucidly. Yet you wouldn't have to read his work too long to find his extreme positions. He cheerfully advocates infanticide and euthanasia ...

People come to the Christian faith via many different highways, but the eventual crossroad is always an encounter with Jesus. I wonder if my attempts to keep my witness non-threatening and accessible sometimes end up shielding the un-churched people around me from their own crossroad. Jesus can certainly meet them without my assistance. But I would rather be a help than a hindrance.

I was definitely ...

Two weeks after the [2008 presidential] election, I traveled to India to meet Christian pioneers seeking to overturn India's institutional form of discrimination, the caste system. One scholar said to me, "You Americans are celebrating the election of a black man after only 250 years of slavery. We are still waiting for liberation after 4,000 years of living under caste." The Dalit Freedom Network ...

Not long after we moved [into our first house in California], my wife, Janie, and I picked up on the tension between a couple of neighbors. One was a very outspoken churchgoer, while the other was an unbeliever. I knew I was in the hot seat when the unchurched man struck up a conversation with me as we were both working in our yards.

"Say, Steve, aren't you a pastor?" It seems implicit in the public's ...

Matthew Parris is a newspaper columnist for The Times of London and a self-described atheist. Surprisingly, though, in a December 2008 column he wrote an article titled "As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God." Parris admits that saying this runs counter to his beliefs, but he cannot ignore the difference that he sees in African Christians. Parris, who grew up in Africa, writes:

Before Christmas ...