Real Life

It was quite overwhelming yesterday to see hundreds of men filing into the seminar I was doing on the topic of “Dealing with Anger” for the excellent No Regrets men’s conference at Elmbrook Church. There was a sense of urgency in their faces, which reminded me of how large this issue is in our lives, […]

As I sit by the fireplace with the wind outside howling and blurry flashes of snow outside the window cutting one way and then the other, I am comforted by one thought. My friends in Chicago are getting hit harder than we are here in Wisconsin. (Just joking, Chicago friends. You have suffered enough.) I

When the ancient Hebrews were told that God was going to bring them into a land flowing with milk and honey, they were promised a very small strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Desert (the whole area is sometime called “the fertile crescent“). The nation of Israel was founded on that

On this date in 1961 President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell speech to a national television audience and coined a phrase to describe a frightening new reality: “the military-industrial complex.” This was a kind of prophetic word, a warning to the whole world that a new monster of our own making was on the

You approach an intersection where a disheveled homeless man with a wild mop of hair approaches your open window with a scrubby hand-scrawled sign on cardboard that says “I have a God-given gift…” Yeah, right. The sign says: “I have a God-given gift of a great voice.” So a TV reporter from Columbus, Ohio, rolls

[New to The Brook Network? You may benefit by having new postings delivered via email, RSS feed, or Twitter.] In many doorways of the Roman Empire there was a depiction of a god with two faces pointing in opposite directions. Janus was the god of transitions. He looked ahead and he looked behind–to the past

[New to The Brook Network? You may benefit by having new postings delivered via email, RSS feed, or Twitter] Want to do regular Bible reading in 2011? Some of my favorite Bible reading plans are put out by the Navigators, and can be downloaded free. Here are three Bible reading plans. I suppose it’s a cultural thing, but,

According to last year’s U.S. census, 45% of households are maintained by unmarried women or men. In our churches, single adults comprise a third or more of the typical congregation. So why is it that most churches offer very little reflection on the single life? Why is it that biases against unmarried adults remain so

I’ve written in the past about Christopher Hitchens, the razor-tongued journalist whose writings on atheism have convinced some and come off as woefully uninformed and biased by others. His 2007 book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, was a popular anti-creed, and he liked to travel the country debating believers. Now Hitchens is facing

That’s the eye-catching title of an AP article about a home video that has gone viral on the internet in which a small group of people are seen dancing to the disco tune “I Will Survive” at the gate of Auschwitz and other sites of the Holocaust. The key to understanding the video is that

I found the 130 comments that many of you posted on the topic of temptations today very helpful as I prepared the sermon for last weekend at Elmbrook. I asked you to complete the following sentence: “One of the powerful temptations we all have to guard against today is…” The results? Dozens of different ideas.