It all started with Montgomery Ward Department Store, which in 1939 was looking for a marketing gimmick and prevailed on one of its bright young men in the advertising department to compose a Christmas poem. Robert May produced a little ditty that Montgomery Ward then...

The year was 1962, the month was October, and the crisis was the United States’ discovery that the Soviets had secretly installed ballistic missiles in Cuba. The world waited with bated breath as the world’s two superpowers engaged in a dangerous dance of...

I know exactly where I was when the seed of this sermon was planted. I was running through the so-called Eternal City of Rome in the early morning, before dawn. I passed various famous buildings of ancient Rome, enduring emblems of the empire’s astounding wealth,...

How often do we stop to recognize that God’s covenant interaction with humanity starts with the simple command, “Go”? God says to Abram, “Go! Go from your country and go from your kindred to the land that I will show you.” God says to Moses, “Go confront Pharaoh and...

People like to assert the timeworn axiom that hindsight is 20-20. More than most axioms, that truism is dead wrong. Few among us see the past any more clearly than we see the present or future. If hindsight were 20-20, historians wouldn’t spend years developing the...