LE Blog

What exactly is “thanks” or “thankfulness”? Is it a feeling, an emotion, a set of actions, or an attitude? These are harder questions to answer than it might at first seem. I’ve been pondering them these past weeks as my wife and I work on teaching our three year old

Let’s be honest, many of our nation’s sportswriters probably wrote two versions of their game story last Sunday; one for if he won, another for if he lost? This story called for drama, and the narrative angles were too complex to await the conclusion of the actual game. And if

WWTD – What Would Teddy Do? While this question is unlikely to spawn any adolescent evangelical fashion trends, it does have some cache these days. In the wake of the passing of the Senior Senator from Massachusetts many of his former colleagues in our nation’s legislature are reflecting on his

My favorite philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, was fond of reminding his fellows and readers that the world has a way of correcting (sometimes brutally) our false ideas. Misjudge a staircase and you get a bruised knee, misjudge the weather and you get wet, misjudge the market and you go broke.

Day 2, On the Banks of the Jessup River, 6 miles north of Piseco, NY. I had been making almost record time all day. It was only 3:00 PM and I’d covered nearly 15 miles through the woods. My 50 lb. pack was starting to chafe a bit, but the

It’s truly amazing the trouble a little box can cause. The little box I’m thing looked like this symbol ⌂ and beside it was an innocuous word: outreach. But oh Nelly the trouble that little box causes! What an idea! Maybe we could increase giving to the church by giving

I spent several eye opening hours in the library this week doing some personal research and tracking down sources for teaching projects. For a while I’d been looking for a particular Newsweek cover article on Evangelicalism and I finally tracked it down. This doesn’t sound like much, but the article

After three weeks the raging flames of national pride have finally abated. Not only does life in Quebec deprive the American sojourner of his precious Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi – available so far as I can tell only in the U.S. – but it subjects him to yet another day

I worry about condemning hypocrites because someday I may want to be one myself. The media loves a good story of a politician professing one thing and practicing another. Throw in sex, a foreign mistress, and the possibility of misspent public funds and they go positively haywire. Even the normally

This past week we watched as President Obama spoke to the Muslim world and raised, yet again, the prospect of peace in the Middle East. Many of us are praying that the new administration finds a way to accomplish what so many others have failed to do, but we’re skeptical.

My late grandfather was a wonderful Christian servant and brilliant social engineer. All five of his children and his many grandchildren rave about him, with only one glaring exception. His kids found him tyrannical when it came to settling fights among siblings. No matter how bad the squabble, not matter

Here it comes! Get ready! Tick, Tick, Tick! Tick!..Tick!!..Tick!!!. If you’ve ever been on a roller coaster you know the building feelings of suspense that accompany those Ticks or Clicks. The tension builds as the potential energy increases, and we eagerly await the coming plunge. It’s hard to tell whether

There are peculiar stories/myths about the great philosopher Baruch Spinoza leaving Judaism. Instead of simply drifting away, he respected the tradition enough to participate in a ceremony that removed him from the community. Members of his synagogue ritually stepped over him as he lay prone, thus removing him from the