This post comes a day late, but I trust it will still be helpful as we reflect on the ministry and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He is celebrated by Americans as a civil rights leader, but we often forget that he was also a minister of the gospel. In fact, King told a Chicago congregation in 1967,  “Before I was a civil rights leader, I was a preacher of the gospel. This was my first calling and it still remains my greatest commitment.” It is only within this larger calling that we can make sense of his civil rights work. For King, combating the injustice of segregation and Jim Crow was part of being a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. It was how he loved…

What should worship look like? Hymns or choruses? High liturgy or free-flowing? Electric or acoustic? Contemporary or traditional? Energetic or reflective? These questions have caused the fracture of many churches, and the battles fought have left many wounded and disenchanted with ministry. They are also questions which I do not address in my recent book, The Divine Commodity.

Apparently there is an excerpt from the book floating around the web from which people have wrongly concluding that I favor a particular style of worship over another, or that I am somehow anti-contemporary worship and much prefer sedate forms of ecclesiastical gathering and would even go so far as to judge one style as “wrong.” (The very idea that a style can be wrong is funny to begin with. That’s like saying…

News out of Egypt today reports that 7 Christians were killed in a drive by shooting after a Christmas Eve mass. (Coptic Christians celebrate Christmas on January 7.) The article from the BBC says: “Coptic Christians - who make up 10% of Egypt’s 80 million population - have complained of harassment and discrimination. Some Copts argue that previous attacks on them have gone unpunished or have resulted in light sentences.”

This comes on the heels of Fox News anchor Brit Hume complaining on Bill O’Reilly’s show that in our culture if “you speak the name Jesus Christ…all hell breaks loose.” (More on Brit Hume below.) But that raises a question: Are Christians in the US persecuted?

Many would like to think we are. Sure, some folks get uncomfortable when Jesus…

Confession time. I’ve never watched An Inconvenient Truth. I’ve never read Earth in the Balance. In fact I’ve never studied the global warming issue in any depth beyond the occasional news article in Time magazine. I’m not sure this is anything to be ashamed about…I’m probably like many Americans in this regard.

But since Barack Obama has taken office and everything is now green (”green economy,” “green jobs,” “green energy,” “green cars,” and “green business”) I’ve started to actually pay attention to the issue of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

I know what the “deniers” on the right think. Rush Limbaugh is fond of saying that humans didn’t create life on earth and therefore we cannot destroy it. He says global warming is a myth concocted by lefty scientists to scare…

Today the world’s tallest building is opening in Dubai. There have been a number of “world’s tallest” titles handed out in recent years. Some of the titles have been contested on technicalities…apparently antennas don’t count but spires do. But there is no question that the Burj Dubai deserves to be called the world’s tallest. It has 160 floors and reaches an amazing 2,717 feet up.

But what does this new record holder mean? What does it symbolize?

A brief history of the record holding structures reveals the economic, political, and cultural shifts of the last 200 years. Consider that for most of recorded history the Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt, was the tallest structure. It was not surpassed until the Lincoln Cathedral was built in the UK in 1311.  The record…