Feb 1, 2025 · O ne of the most dangerous aspects of religion is the willingness of some of its adherents to imagine that they can grasp the fullness of God and understand how, where, when and why God acts in human affairs.. Ever since Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt while campaigning last year in Pennsylvania, lots of people have declared that he survived only because God intervened so that ...

Jan 20, 2024 · E very human being at some point experiences pain, grief, catastrophe, loss. In fact, I wrote about a few examples in my own life in my most recent blog post here.. The ultimate question is how we respond to disasters so they don't irrevocably break us.

Feb 2, 2021 · A few days ago, at their invitation, I spoke to members of the faculty of Central Baptist Theological Seminary about my new book, Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety.. Our general topic was religious extremism and what we can do to unplug it, which is part of what my book is about. In our conversation, one of the faculty members mentioned his ...

Jun 2, 2021 · A few weeks after my birth, a woman named Caroline wrote to my mother to share some mediocre-to-bad theology.. It requires a bit of background information to understand. So: When my oldest sister, Karin, was born more than six years before me, she emerged with a …

Feb 2, 2022 · M any times in recent decades, I've written about the relationship between religious ideas and science. Quick summary of that: Each area tries to answer different questions. Science is about what, how, when and other measurables. Religion asks about purpose, about meaning, about eternal questions.

Nov 11, 2023 · Y esterday, my late father -- another Bill Tammeus, though his real first name was Wilber and mine's William -- would have turned 114 years old. I still miss him, of course, though he died almost 32 years ago. His kid brother, however, is still with us. And, inshallah, will turn 102 in late March. Having just passed All Saints Day a week ago, I've been continuing now to ponder the brevity of ...

Dec 12, 2021 · F or Christmas this year, I'm going to reproduce for you a Christmas tale I told years ago in the now-defunct Star Magazine, which used to appear each Sunday in The Kansas City Star.. In it, I try to get at the heart of Christmas by describing an old Nativity Scene that was present each year in the home in which I grew up in Woodstock, Ill.

Feb 3, 2024 · Nashville, Tenn., and Delavan, Ill. -- I've double-datelined this piece because I want to tell you two interrelated family stories that are rooted in faithful living. Recently my wife Marcia and I drove to Nashville to celebrate the 19th birthday...

Jun 13, 2022 · L ast week here on the blog I discussed whether it ever will be possible to have a historically accurate biography of Jesus of Nazareth. (Spoiler alert: Probably not.) So what if we back up about 1,000 years and ask something like the same question of King David (seen here in his high school graduation photo), said to be the creator of the House of David, from which eventually Jesus came ...

A s the archives of this blog will attest, I started it in December 2004 when I was still a full-time columnist at The Kansas City Star.. I've loved the daily rhythm of doing it -- as, earlier, I loved the rhythm of writing a daily editorial page column, "Starbeams," for The Star for some 27 years before I shifted to a weekly column in the Faith section.