‘Tis the season of high school and collegiate football matches. (Indeed, my loyalties will be tested sorely this weekend as the Nittany Lions of Penn State venture to chilly Minneapolis to take on the Golden Gophers of the University of Minnesota.) And along with the contest on the gridiron is another festivity not to be missed: the half-time show countless marching bands put on each Saturday afternoon. The Unionville-Chadds Ford School where my children now attend has an awesome marching band, and it’s been fun throughout the late summer and fall to hear them practice from outside our home just a mile away and to see them whenever...

Do you remember the “Three Cs”? You might have learned them while playing sports or performing music or participating in theater. They are the kind of thing a coach or conductor or director will remind anxious players about in order to help them perform their best. The three Cs, as I learned them, were calm, cool, and collected. When a coach or director calls them out, she is inviting the player to pull out of the nosedive of panic that sometimes sets in when you feel under pressure. When we panic we often get impatient and rush our decisions. When we panic we often freeze up and find ourselves unable to take a good shot at the goal or...

Six and a half minutes. That’s all it will take for you to watch this remarkably inspiring TED Talk of one person’s sensitivity and vision that became a gift first to her neighborhood and then to neighborhoods throughout the world. Candy Chang is what I would describe as a community artist. She is, indeed, an artist…and a designer…and an urban planner. But what strikes me most about her is that she takes all these varied skills and uses them to offer gifts to her community, to invite her community to understand, refine, and claim their identity more fully. In this sense, then, she is an artist for her community, a public artist...

For the last several days, I have been participating in the Toronto Preaching Festival, sponsored by the Lester Randall Preaching Fellowship and a number of local congregations. It’s been a marvelous event, and I highly recommend it to folks both north and south of the 49th parallel. One of the speakers yesterday mentioned Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian minister and author who wrote what I still think is the finest book on preaching ever written. Titled simply Telling the Truth, it’s subtitle is as telling as it is evocative: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. It’s a remarkable book, who lyrical prose, deep insights,...