I have never published something in memoriam, nor have I published much about love for the poor. The former is because I have only honored those close to me in short pieces written for funerals, circulated among family. The latter is because the poor—homeless, ragged, and oft-demented—have deeply frightened me. I
Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) deeply influenced the Vienna Circle, initially provided a philosophical foundation for their logical positivism. Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and other logical positivists eagerly latched onto his assertion that language functions by picturing facts about the world, leading them to declare that any
Issue 98 of Administration Matters 2025 ELCA Churchwide Assembly The 2025 ELCA Churchwide Assembly will take place July 28–Aug. 2 in Phoenix, Ariz. Under the theme “For the Life of the World,” the assembly will meet around word and water, wine and bread, to carry on its work on behalf
Colossians: How Suffering Refines Faith and Advances the Gospel’s Reach In this episode of Sermon Notes, host Brian Ball and guest Fadi Al Hagal, the Multiplication Minister at Brentwood Baptist, delve into the themes of church multiplication and suffering in the Christian faith. They discuss the role of church
How to Level Up Evangelistic Growth in Your Church “What fuels church health? Many factors contribute, but one of the most significant—maybe the most significant—is intentional evangelism. In this issue, we explore data from Exponential’s “Becoming Five Multiplication Study,” which surveyed more than 1,000 Protestant churches in the United States.
The title of Pope Francis’s encyclical Dilexit Nos (2024) can be translated “He loved us,” but we would do better to translate it more literally as “God delighted in us.” I will talk about God’s delight, our delight (if we are able to muster it), and how Jesus’s Sacred Heart
Many years ago, Nancy and I bought an old house. It smelled bad. The interior walls were covered with coal dust. The lawn was mostly dead. The draperies were sad and tired. The carpets were worse. As we lived there, we learned that it was almost impossible to heat. We