Today’s Daily Bread devotional considers the call to “give to God what is God’s” by striving to live out the ethics of God’s kingdom in our daily lives. As I noted in that post, that’s can sometimes be easier said than done. When it comes to our political lives, for instance, it can be difficult to discern at times what candidates to vote for or what policies to support, and faithful Christians can certainly disagree on these matters. At the same time, Jesus consistently advocates for the most vulnerable among us, which does provide an important framework and set of convictions from which to make these kinds of decisions. Along...

I love brain research. That may seem an odd thing to say, but I find recent advances in brain imaging and what it reveals about our brains fascinating. I also love brain research because I’m a parent, and one of the interesting things that brain imaging and research has revealed is how much longer the brain takes to develop than we’d imagined. In particular, the prefrontal cortex – the place where decision making lies – develops far more slowly than we’d thought in general and develops even more slowly in boys than girls in particular. Which helps to explain a lot about the behavior of our adolescent...

I grew up in small city in Pennsylvania and most of my friends went to church. I had only one classmate, as far as I can remember, that was Jewish. But while I learned from him some things about Hanukah – probably because it seemed “close” to Christmas – I never learned about Yom Kippur; in fact, I’m not sure I knew it existed. In college I had a lot more Jewish friends, so I knew that Yom Kippur was important to them, and I knew it meant “Day of Atonement,” but that’s about it. So if you’re anything like me, you might be helped by even these few paragraphs from a brief article on Yom Kippur from the Huffington Post: The...

Regarding prayer, I’ve said before that while I don’t understand prayer, I still do it. And I think that’s true of various elements of the faith, full understanding isn’t a requirement for participation. Whether it’s prayer, or the Lord’s Supper, or forgiveness, we are called to participate even as we still seek to understand better. I think these two things are connected and rest near the heart of the life of faith, in fact. First, that there is an element of irreducible mystery to our faith that doesn’t require full understanding to be embraced and, second, that we are still beckoned always to understand more fully. Embracing...