So once a month, I have to gird my loins and sit down with my frenemy and podcaster Luke Norsworthy to talk about all the mistakes he’s made over the last few weeks and how much room he has for improvement. We always have plenty to talk about. This month, Luke’s had some great interviews with Brian McClaren, Steven Moore and Randy Harris on Black Rage, and a live podcast he did with Richard Beck and Caleb Kaltenbach about creating better... Read more

Recently the wildly popular podcast This American Life ran a fascinating story about a unique phone booth in Japan. The story takes place in a little town called Otsuchi that was devastated by the 2011 Tsunami. Before the Tsunami hit, an older man named Itaru Sasaki had installed a disconnected phone booth overlooking the Pacific ocean as a way of helping him cope with the death of a family member. He would go into the booth and “talk” to his deceased relative. It... Read more

  “How come the Muggles don’t hear the bus?” said Harry. “Them!” said Stan contemptuously. “Don’t listen properly, do they? Don’t look properly either. Never notice nuthing, they don’t. – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban When I was a kid my mom read a book on Hollywood and the Occult. If I could change one thing about my childhood it would be to rid that book from the pages of history. The author had painstakingly gone through every... Read more

So for the past few years, I’ve been thinking a lot about time. What we do with it, why we always feel like we’re running out of it, why we’re so busy constantly, and why everything we’re so frantically pursuing just seems to get further and further away. As a pastor, one of the things that keeps me up at night is that there are so many lonely people in church. Church is supposed to be a place of connection... Read more

     We are what we eat. —Ludwig Feuerbach, nineteenth-century German philosopher One of my favorite stories of the Old Order Amish culture is about how they eat meals together. You may know that when an Amish son or daughter turns 18, they go on Rumspringa (a word meaning running around) where they leave their family and the Amish way of life to go sow their wild oats, check out the ways of the world and basically do anything they want. I love that idea. These are kids... Read more

I’ll get right to the point. You don’t have time to read this. You’re important and you’ve got pressing things to do. Chances are if you’ve taking time to read this, you’re also doing something else at the same time. (95% of people in a recent TV Guide survey admitted to using their smart phone in the bathroom). The average person on this blog stays here for just over a minute, long enough to skim the gist of something and... Read more