By Ken Sehested I don’t know what it was that penetrated my groggy reading of the Sunday morning paper, sitting at the kitchen table, the coffee maker’s final perks hacking like a smoker’s cough. Something, subliminally, coming from the radio…
How merry can your pastor’s Christmas be?
By Elizabeth Evans Hagan “Are we having church on Christmas Day this year?” Such has been a constant question asked at my office door since Thanksgiving. The answer is an enthusiastic “yes, of course we are” (even if the music…
The perfect gift
By Amy Butler This time of year especially, I wish that gift-giving in our society happened a little differently than it does. The giving of gifts is forced into excessive displays concentrated in short periods of time every once in…
Take a digital fast this Advent
By Alan Rudnick Driving to Virginia to spend Thanksgiving with my family I wasn’t thinking about turkey, cranberry sauce or who would get to try their luck at the wishbone. I thought about only one thing: Twitter. This year I…
How would Tim Tebow defend Christmas?
By Jim Denison Gov. Lincoln Chafee recently made national headlines by calling the Rhode Island State House’s 17-foot spruce a “holiday” tree. When critics complained, he urged them to volunteer to help needy people instead. In response, the Providence Catholic…
When Jesus had a pacifier
By Bill Leonard For more years than anyone remembers First Baptist Church, Highland Avenue, in Winston-Salem, N.C., has marked Advent with “The Nativity,” a living reenactment of the birth of Jesus presented in worship on the second Sunday of the…
Enrich your life by living gratefully
By Rabbi Rami Shapiro What are you grateful for? Try not to cough up the usual suspects: sunsets, daisies, puppies, babies and babies playing with puppies among the daisies at sunset. True, I’m grateful that the earth orbits the sun,…
Do dogs go to heaven?
While we were away for Thanksgiving with our two daughters who live in New York, our middle daughter, Erin, called with the drastic news that her 13-and-a-half-year-old white lab named Hannah Marie Furr-Yeager (her husband just called her “Good Girl”)…
Tebow apologetics
Football and politics have something in common these days besides combat. Each wrestles with the role religion plays in its game.