We have entered the eighth month of what feels like a pandemic that will not end. Many of us are tired of it and long for life to be “normal” again, whatever normal is. It has disrupted every aspect of our lives including family, work, education, social gatherings, church, community, politics, government, voting, health care and friendship. Silver linings exist but it’s now hard to see them through the high levels of stress and emotional exhaustion. We should heed the advice of Victor Frankl who famously said, “Everything can be taken away......

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Our family just returned from a fall break trip to the beach. It was good to get away and relax for a few days. Of the many hats I get to wear – minister, pastor, preacher, counselor, professor – the most important roles that I have are that of husband and father. On the trip, I started reading an insightful new book by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks titled Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times. Sacks is a well-known British rabbi and a public intellectual. In the fourth chapter, he talks about......

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My undergraduate course this fall at Vanderbilt is called “Faith, Politics, and Polarization in American culture.” We are closely studying the research of NYU’s Jonathan Haidt and Harvard’s Arthur Brooks. Haidt is a social psychologist who has done significant research on morality and the basic moral foundations of liberals and conservatives. In his book The Righteous Mind, Haidt defines moral systems in the following way: “Interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.”......

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I recently sat with a heartbroken family who tragically lost their husband/father to suicide. It came out of the blue – no hints, no warnings, no signs whatsoever. I was there because I lived through the same thing years ago with my own mother. The only difference was, we knew she was sick and had done everything in our power to help. This family didn’t have that chance. There is comfort, I believe, in talking to others who have been through similar tragedies in their own life. We don’t suffer alone. We......

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