(OPINION) In my childhood, Catholics were encouraged to “make a visit” to church to light a candle for the sick or say a prayer for some special intention. Though I (and many others) fell out of this practice over the years, I found myself once again “making a visit” to churches when I began to study, teach and travel abroad.
Read More(OPINION) After our Baptist congregation laid hands on him and prayed, Dad was instantaneously healed. Without treatment. His miraculous recovery was documented by a team of Lexington, Ky., doctors and later confirmed by a second panel of physicians in Washington, D.C. Dad wound up being interviewed on national TV and written about in various publications.
Read More(OPINION) Many leaders I talk to feel the same tension. We can see the division. We can feel the distance growing. We know something deeper than politics is breaking down. So we ask: What do we actually do about it?
Read More(OPINION) In one of those strange turns of life, Christine Powell found herself navigating a world that she had once only observed as a young professional right out of college.
Read More(OPINION) As I wrote two weeks ago, this will be my last column for the Lexington Herald-Leader. Leaving its pages feels like saying a final goodbye to a treasured friend. My columns will continue to appear monthly on an excellent (and free) website, Religion Unplugged.
Read More(OPINION) I arrived at the Lexington Herald-Leader in 1986 as the oldest intern anybody in the newsroom had ever seen. I was 30, working on a Ph.D. in communications at the University of Kentucky and playing catchup from a misspent youth that had put me way behind in my career journey.
Read More(OPINION) We often talk about polarization, or division, or dysfunction. But underneath all of that is something deeper: We are losing our civil contract. Not just a legal contract, but a human one.
Read More(OPINION) Most of us can recognize and control that primitive impulse to club everything in sight in favor of safety and civilization. Between wars from way back, humans dropped the club and learned to speak, to convey meaning from sounds and symbols, and I kinda like the words-over-weapons thing we had going. You can make friends with words, only enemies with weapons.
Read More(OPINION) Striving for success, status, and achievement often deepens emptiness rather than fulfillment. True meaning comes from cultivating love, faith in something greater, hopeful expectation, benevolence toward others, a sense of humor and mercy. These qualities, more than external rewards, sustain a satisfying, grounded life and ease the burden of human imperfection.
Read More(OPINION) As a journalist, I’ve met thousands of people over more than three decades, and heard a lot of … interesting theories about life, spirituality, current events and so forth.
Read More(Opinion) It’s all about being faithful. You do what you can, and what you should, even if the results are out of your hands. Of course, the results are always out of your hands. You plant flowers even if the vandals trample them down.
Read More(OPINION) Conservative Christians want the Ten Commandments in our classrooms and courtrooms, while their preferred candidate and president shreds the Ninth Commandment’s order to not “bear false witness against our neighbor” with abandon.
Read MoreThe Rev. Jesse Jackson’s life was not without controversy. Still, the civil rights icon’s immense influence was evident in the wake of his passing.
Read More(OPINION) Drawing on a quote attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald and a passage from Ecclesiastes, I look at the challenges today’s binary thinking. From immigration debates to religion and marriage, it argues that wisdom lies between extremes, where justice and compassion, conviction and humility, can coexist without flattening complex human realities in society.
Read MoreU.S. Army soldier. Republican congressman. Executive pastor. That was former U.S. Rep. Steve Russell’s career path before his 2022 recruitment to lead a North Carolina-based international ministry known as JAARS — which stands for Jungle Aviation and Relay Service.
Read More(OPINION) As a prolific writer — both fiction and non-fiction — when an inspiration hits me, I have to follow through on the process of getting my ideas on paper (or, in these modern times, typed into the computer) or it bugs me no end. My latest effort will, eventually, be a book about how not to be “beige.”
Read MoreWith a record $1.76 billion expected to be wagered on the Super Bowl, more people are asking if legal sports betting is good or bad for America.
Read More(OPINION) When winter streets freeze and night skies are black and snow swerves down against the glow of porch lights, my thoughts inevitably turn to one of the more powerful works of fiction I know, James Joyce’s story “The Dead,” which appeared in his 1914 collection “Dubliners.”
Read More(OPINION) What we are witnessing is not politics or social protest. Not public policy or propaganda. It is virtue made visible. Peace practiced rather than pronounced. Compassion offered without condition or agenda. Perhaps we need to wait and see what fruit this pilgrimage bears. Perhaps God is at work here, walking slowly among us.
Read More(OPINION) Children, long ago in a land far away, I aspired to be a writer of serious fiction rather than of ephemeral newspaper columns.
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