I like Shane and Shane. Not only are they talented singers, they're principled artists. A lot of their songs are simply Scripture set to music. A lot of people (myself included) hear that and think "Um...yeah. No thanks"...but it really works.

I recently had an interesting conversation with a friend about illegal immigration. She drew a parallel between East Germans escaping tyranny through Checkpoint Charlie and illegal immigrants from Mexico escaping the tyranny of poverty.

I'll admit to being a bit of a Scrooge. Like a lot of dudes, I'm not real excited about the holidays. There are a few exceptions: I love buying gifts for people I care about, I love the downtime that everybody expects with the holidays, and I love the song O Holy Night.

I love a good mystery. No, not the Agatha Christie kind...those have never really caught my attention. I mean the real mysteries of life: Stonehenge, the Great Pyramids, the Money Pit, and the rest.

I've never considered Newsweek Magazine to be an authority on theology, primarily because they're not. Dedicating a section of your magazine to religion doesn't mean you know what you're talking about... especially when you're well-known for being absurdly biased.

One of the main conversation points seems to go like this: should Ted Haggard, who left his ministry amid allegations of homosexuality, drug abuse, and dishonesty, be allowed back into ministry?

My friend asked: "Would I be very far off the path in thinking that the writer of Proverbs was in fact referring to the Christ years before he appeared on earth? John used the word The Word and Proverbs uses the word Wisdom."

How would your church handle a protest? Opponents of Proposition 8, California's recently-passed marriage amendment, just might show up at your door. It's not just a California issue...here in Denver, a Book of Mormon was placed on the steps of their local temple and lit on fire. Omaha could be next.

When it comes to abortion, the issue is often divided into two groups: arguments about how to avoid abortion, and arguments about what to do about unwanted pregnancy. That sometimes causes people to argue badly, because they're not really communicating about the same thing.

Like many churches in America, my own church spent a little time yesterday focusing on Veteran's Day. One of my friends had a pretty serious negative reaction, suggesting that such things exemplified nationalism at its worst. She suggested that America had done evil and didn't deserve anyone's allegiance.

Christians probably shouldn't be one-issue voters...but let's not pretend that capital punishment or political wars are somehow the same as abortion. Forget about matters of guilt or innocence and just look objectively at the numbers:

In this video, Barney Frank says that there are a lot of rich people we can tax to pay for government stuff. I wonder how many people realize that "rich" is a relative term. Virtually every American is rich when compared with most of the world's population. Are you rich?