Ebenezer Stone

For awhile now I’ve felt lost in the gutter between the left page and the right. Faith defenders seem unwilling to sacrifice much if anything for the sake of less fortunate people, while the kind acts of those on the other page often seem plagued by arrogance and a fundamental disrespect for authority. Both sides…

A good friend of mine once said that he believes God tells jokes. I happen to like the idea, and with that in mind I offer a brief excerpt from my commute the other day. I don’t remember the last time I’ve enjoyed my ride home so much. Pulling onto the Interstate, I was reflecting…

“It is hard, I repeat, to talk to you of religion. But without faith in each other, we cannot go on. Without hope we cannot go on. Without hope we cannot live. To those who are without hope, I remind you of Christ, your brother. Religion, thought of in terms of our brotherhood through Christ,…

So what’s your method of discerning God’s will? For that matter, does God even have a “will” regarding decisions outside of the moral realm? I’m inclined to believe that unless it’s clearly prohibited in scripture, God’s answer to life’s difficult questions is something like “either way is fine with me.” When I look under the…

So this morning I was looking for some quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche about art, and because I will never be able to remember how to spell his name, I stumbled across a site with lots of opinions about the foolishness of Christianity. I found myself reading through an “email debate” about the moral argument for…

If you love someone, set them free — such a loaded notion for me. As a parent of two children who’ve yet to enter gradeschool, this idea just doesn’t fit very well. The love I have more my daughters would more accurately translate into something like, “if you love someone… teach, protect, guide, discipline, and…

Last year Kim and I began a focused effort to get out of debt. Last month we finally climbed out of the hole. Last week on NPR I listened to an author discuss her grandmother’s views on living a frugal lifestyle in order to be ready for the future. Yesterday I listened to an economist…

He doth give His joy to all; He becomes an infant small; He becomes a man of woe; He doth feel the sorrow too. Think not thou canst sigh a sigh And thy Maker is not by; Think not thou canst weep a tear And thy Maker is not near. O! He gives to us…

A person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. As long as we think that the next election might eliminate crime and establish justice or another scientific breakthrough might save the environment or another pay raise might push us over the…

Several years ago on a clear winter day, I visited the Andersonville Confederate prison, and as I walked freely over the haunted ground that once confined over thirty-thousand men, I was overcome by a vision of our state as human beings. Andersonville was a pit of disease, starvation, and hopelessness. Only the stench was free…