I RECENTLY HIT ON A MOTHER LODE OF ODD QUOTES—some rich, some funny. Here’s a smattering: An Old Irish Saying: Death leaves a heartache no one can heal; Love leaves a memory no one can steal.   He who sings prays twice.                       ~St. Augustine  ...

GIVING BIRTH IS A PAIN. Some of you know what I’m talking about. My first labor, six days of it, allows me to speak with some authority. Mary underwent her pain in grungy digs, but women have given birth in far worse places. A week later, however, Simeon—the old man...

GETTING SCAMMED and losing a hunk of cash is not the best way to celebrate Christmas. Not fun at all. Bare-bones account: The trickster—let’s call him Steve—said over the phone that he owed me $200 from some old account. He would put it back into my account—which he...

Yeah, that title sounds bizarre, but it’s the normal sort of stuff that flows from Eugene Peterson. My friend George Varghese sent me the book, and it has set my heart on fire. In his sermon on what the Messiah would look like, Peterson lines out the then-current...

We’re familiar with the phrase the least of these, as given by Jesus. Whatever we do for one of them, He says, we do for Him. But World columnist Andrée Seu Peterson turned that phrase on its head when she described her father-in-law as being “one of the most of...