Yesterday on the first Sunday of Advent the preacher talked about hope. We all were asked to write down something from our personal lives that makes us hopeless, and then bring those scraps of paper up during Communion; they would [...]

Starting tomorrow we’re in for a treat.  That’s when we’ll begin a special Advent series featuring the photography of the very talented, fellow saint and sinner Katie Archibald-Woodward.  (Just think: we’ll get to say that we knew Katie before she [...]

Probably most of us know commentator, author and actor Ben Stein from his taking attendance in the 1986 movie, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”  Here Stein, a God-fearing Jew, shares his views on the merits of Christmas and why at this [...]

Some friends in a recent Christmas letter joked about their search for just the right present for their newborn baby.  After scouring Amazon.com for gift ideas, they came up with a number of questionable gift ideas for young children, the [...]

I promised you a Christmas story.  This one is a Christmas story in several unique ways.  It’s a story about God’s grace not as a distant ideal but as an embodied, tangible, very personal encounter. And it’s a story about [...]

“I want Jesus!,” my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter exclaimed the other day, as she grasped for the ceramic baby Jesus in the nativity scene on our kitchen table. These days when advertisers prostitute themselves for our dollars and every manner of holiday [...]