telling – Page 2 – 300 words a day

a teacher who recruits

College admissions offices spend enormous energy recruiting students. Most faculty members don’t. The faculty are part of the product that recruiters sell. “If you come here, you will get to study with Dr. X. He’s the one who wrote that famous commentary on John. In fact, he was on the translation team.” It’s possible that […]

by Jon Swanson

Life is short

[First Friday guest post from Paul Merrill] My mom died in June. She was a month shy of 80. Her life was long and full, by most standards. Psalm 39:4 says: Lord, remind me how brief my time on earth will be. Remind me that my days are numbered – how fleeting my life is. […]

by Jon Swanson

the upper left corner

I am not a formally-trained theologian. I am a formally-trained rhetorical scholar. I look at arguments or explanations or descriptions in the Bible more as conversations than as systematic theological statements. I want to see the people behind the words, to consider why a person would come to say that. Yesterday, you read my attempt […]

by Jon Swanson

ninety five percent of the time

I heard the numbers long ago. I don’t remember them exactly. I don’t remember the speaker either. He was a business ethicist, talking to business people about ethics. (Profound. I know). He said, approximately, “ninety five percent of the time, doing the ethical thing makes good business sense. So it’s not what you do ninety […]

by Jon Swanson

what happened in our backyard

We spent the day working on our yard. We are getting ready for summer, ready for graduation. I spent part of the morning in two of our perennial beds, turning the soil with a shovel. Nancy went through those beds after I did, breaking up clumps of dirt, pulling out the weeds, planting some new […]