I grew up in the era of great Broadway musicals – The Sound of Music, Oklahoma!, The Music Man, My Fair Lady, West Side Story and the like. I must admit that as a child I had little use for these extravaganzas because they seemed so false at heart. Nobody in real life...

“Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down; but a good word makes him glad.” On this First Sunday of Advent, our gaze turns irrepressibly toward the climactic, glorious moment of Christmas Day and the celebration of the birth of the Christ gift, even as we enter this...

A new verb has entered our vocabulary. This verb may not yet be included in a modern dictionary, but it has certainly entered the modern lexicon of usage. It is the verb, “to google,” as in “I heard my wife tell my daughter, ‘I was looking for a recipe so I googled...

If you abandoned a young tadpole, a young snake and a human infant at the edge of a pond, the tadpole would enter the water immediately and swim away, the snake would find a hole in which to curl up – and the human infant would die. The human baby’s potential far...

Never forget that in this situation the disciples were trying to do a very good thing. They were trying to heal a young boy of epilepsy. They had watched Jesus perform similar healings many times. They knew exactly what words he had said, knew exactly what actions he...