Your Life in Six Words

It started as a contest on the online writer’s magazine SMITH.  Readers were challenged to write their own biography in six words.  They gave the classic example of the mini-masterpiece penned by Ernest Hemingway:  “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Readers were encouraged to send in their examples and the best of the best would be published.  15,000 people responded. That contest turned into a book and that...

I Don’t Know

On Tuesday, February 5, while many were voting in the Super Tuesday primaries, a series of killer tornadoes ripped through the south, killing at least 59 and wounding hundreds more.  In rural Macon County, Tennessee, 14 people were killed and many more left homeless. Rev. Michael Welch, pastor of the Lafayette United Methodist Church mobilized his congregation to serve, opening the church as a family crisis...

Friends in Both Places

The story is told that at a social gathering author Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) walked up on a lively conversation about heaven and hell.  When the participants asked Clemens to weigh in on the matter, the quick-witted writer said he would rather not comment because he had friends in both places. Jimmy Carter sings with Gov. Sonny Pardue and William Shaw at the New Baptist Covenant meeting      That anecdote...

The Ghosts of Birmingham

BIRMINGHAM, AL — My father grew up not far from here in the town of Gadsden, and he attended the University of Alabama in nearby Tuscaloosa.  I have vague memories of visiting this town as a boy, just as I have equally vague memories of family discussions about the civil rights movement.  For all practical purposes, my time here this week was my first real trip to Birmingham. I was fortunate to grow up in a home...

My Unplanned Experiment in Internet Deprivation

On a normal day, I spend about 18 hours a day awake.  Of the 18 hours that I am awake, I am on the Internet around 15 of those hours.  It’s not that I am an online version of the couch potato – it’s just that’s what I do for a living.  The company I work for is the largest provider of Internet media technology to the world’s faith community.  I manage two Internet media properties and...