Articles that I have written for varied publications.
We boarded the train just after midnight, sad to leave behind the breathless beauty of Venice (and the Italian ice cream sandwiches, of which I had already consumed a half dozen). We were on our way to Nice in the south of France for another adventure on twenty dollars a day. My wife having won…
Note: This article is an adaptation of chapter three of The Promise of Despair: The Way of the Cross as the Way of the Church (Nashville: Abingdon, 2010). This excerpt was extracted and edited by Jonathan Davis. Preface: In conversations about the future of youth ministry or the need for the church to attend to young adults,…
Michelle and Madison were under the same roof but in two different worlds. They were thousands of miles apart though only 30 feet separated them. Both sat looking at their own computer screens: Madison video-Skyping with her neighbor and a foreign exchange student, updating her Flickr account and checking her photo ratings; Michelle, her mother,…
Lily Allen is a mostly unknown name in the United States, but in the UK she is ubiquitous. Her picture is plastered all over the daily papers, her pop songs blare from the radio, and gossip of her escapades fill the tabloids. Lily Allen is one the UK’s great paparazzi magnets because she is one…
An infected person with a glowing green hand touches others who then contract glowing green hands, and who each pass along the glowing green infection to another and then another. This is often how we believe suffering operates. We implicitly assume it’s passed on like an infection, like the green hand. Youth ministry has historically…
Gran Torino is the latest of many great films to be directed by the acclaimed Clint Eastwood. Yet, though the directing is marvelous, it is Eastwood’s acting that has earned him praise for this film. In Gran Torino, Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a curmudgeonly and racist Korean War veteran. Walt lives in a Detroit neighborhood that has…