The irony is, the one to whom God first tried to give the Immanuel gift didn’t want it! It was a gift meant for Ahaz, the king of Judah -- albeit a craven and corrupt king -- but God sent him the prophet Isaiah at a time when this king happened to be worried. Ahaz had...

Most of you know that in the great movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey’s Uncle Billy, his erratic, absent-minded, often tipsy assistant, misplaces $8,000 in the lap of their family nemesis, Henry Potter, as cruel, mean, avaricious and hard-hearted a villain as...

On an ordinary night, amidst an ordinary empire-wide tax census ordered by Caesar Augustus, outside of an insignificant Palestinian hamlet, ordinary young men tending sheep were startled by a heavenly messenger announcing to them that the long-anticipated Messiah had...

Years ago, cruising the periodicals list of the Davidson College library I ran across something called the Illustrated London News. The emphasis of this particular issue was a retrospective on the D-Day invasion, and one particular article caught my eye, a column on...

To begin forming a theology of home, one must begin by acknowledging a biological fact, that human beings share a kinship with much of the natural order when it comes to creating a functional home. A home must enjoy genuine stability for a creature to function within...