Saving Civilization? In the mid-500s, missionaries from Ireland boarded small boats and began to come ashore in Britain and Europe. The once great Roman Empire had long ago gone dark. The great texts of classical Western civilization had largely been destroyed by the hordes of barbarians that had breached Rome’s borders. It was left to…

Hire a prophet. Profits are like breathing, says Max DePree, former head of Herman Miller, Inc. They aren’t the goal of business. They are, however, pretty good evidence of whether or not an enterprise is alive. Prophets are another indicator of health. That’s right – prophets. Marshall McLuhan said every institution needs something like them.

I ate seven bowls of Cocoa Krispies one evening at summer camp. If you had asked me why, I would have said, I wanted to. I didn’t know it then, but I was depicting how God made us to live according to the “four-chapter” gospel.

No Labor Day. If you love Labor Day you might not enjoy heaven that much. But don’t worry. Anyone can acquire a taste for eternity. The key is unpacking the origins of Labor Day, work and holidays. It also requires changing the way we imagine heaven.

Box office and Bible. If friends won’t try the Bible, take them to see The Bourne Ultimatum instead. In fact, watch the entire Bourne trilogy. It takes us right back to the Bible. While Bourne’s story might not look like our day-to-day life, his life does look a lot like the Bible’s age-to-age story. Connecting…

Winston Churchill famously observed that “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” Churchill was right, but he failed to note that the philosophies shaping our buildings come from the same intellectual fermentation tanks that shape literature, music, and the rest of contemporary culture. For the past eighty years, architecture’s thought leaders have been proponents…

Whatever one may think of the last few Bourbon kings of France, they certainly knew how to build well. The legacy they left us at the Louvre and Versailles draws millions of gawkers from around the world. Clearly, tour book architecture is significant. But what about the architecture of our everyday lives? Is there any…

Back page news. Go to the recycle bin and find the “religion” section in last Saturday’s newspaper. Hard to find? Religion is routinely relegated to the least read page in the least read section on the least read day of the week. Why is that?

Wise elders? In the July-August Harvard Business Review, Neil Howe and William Strauss suggest that generations born after a great war or other crisis tend to “grow up as increasingly indulged children, come of age as the narcissistic young crusaders of a spiritual awakening, cultivate principles as moralistic midlifers, and emerge as wise elders.”1 So…

Imagining… not emerging. When we learned earlier this year that the U.S. population shot past 300 million, a great many of us began to feel the squeeze. Yet if the entire population of the United States moved to Texas, we’d each receive two acres. Hmmm… not so crowded now.