I received my author’s copies today! (The audiobook will be released on September 1.) I am so thankful to Jessica and all those at Westminster John Knox Press for the patience, grace, and work on this project. I hope this will be a blessing to those who read it. If […]
Mack
170 posts
Westminster John Knox Press has just posted the page to pre-order my book Beautiful and Terrible Things: A Christian Struggle with Suffering, Grief, and Hope. It is an exciting day! The Amazon link will be coming shortly and I will post that when it goes live. The description from the […]
It is perhaps fitting that first thing Friday morning, the First of November, All Saints’ Day, Editor Jessica sent me the final draft of Beautiful & Terrible Things. The book is written, edited, and now awaits copy editing, formatting, and marketing. Coming in at 164 pages and 51,800 words, I […]
An excerpt from my forthcoming book, Beautiful and Terrible Things. In the months following Mack’s death I would not say that I had a crisis of faith, but I certainly felt a general malaise. I was writing about Mack’s death and my faith in his/our resurrection, and at the same […]
This quote comes from Ecclesiastes which I have been working with (as I strive to finish my book by the August 1 deadline!). For the first time I noticed the rest of the verse. It is better to go to the house of mourningthan to go to the house of […]
Green is not life It is not verdant, growth, eternal It is not a leaf or a clover It is nothing but Green is a color, a slice of spectrum Green is not those other things It is color, frequency, not even universal Some see gray, some see nothing at […]
To the ‘why’ of suffering we get no firm answer. Of course some suffering is easily seen to be the result of our sin: war, assault, poverty amidst plenty, the hurtful word. And maybe some is chastisement. But not all. The meaning of the remainder is not told us. It […]
My SEC colleague from Vanderbilt this week graciously gave me the gift of a slim volume by a former professor of his. The book is A Boy Thirteen: Reflections on Death (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), by Jerry A. Irish. Their 13 year old son Lee died of meningitis in 1973, […]