One of our Brazilian students, Tiago, sent me a video clip from Haiti. It was shot by a Brazilian U.N. peacekeeper soldier moments after the 7.0 magnitude quake struck Port-au-Prince a week ago. While I can’t understand the Portuguese voiceover or subtitles, the footage reality transcends all languages. Cement rubble lies strewn in the city street, a thick cloud of dust hovers above the surreal scene, while survivors stumble in a daze, in silence or with tears and screams.

Haiti’s devastating earthquake on Tuesday afternoon is our crisis, too. As I sit here and write the next morning, initial reports from Port-au-Prince indicate that much of the capital city of nearly 1.5 million residents lies buried beneath collapsed rubble, as the result of the 7.0 magnitude record-breaking temblor. The Parliament building, the presidential palace, the United Nations mission headquarters, hospitals, schools, churches and untold numbers of apartments, houses and tenement buildings have been flattened.

Do you really think new “pat down” measures at the airport will make air travel more secure? I read a piece by syndicated British columnist Gwynne Dyer, and I’m afraid he’s right.

Poor Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary—he can’t even show up at a holiday party without being cornered by another distraught denizen of the English-speaking world with the query, “What are we supposed to call the decade that’s now ended?” Pretend you’re the editor of the dictionary—how would you answer all those emails? After all, we call the 80’s the 80’s and the 90’s the 90’s. But what shall we call the 00’s? The Zeroes? Hardly. How about the Aughts (English for the number 0)? Or the Ohs? Or the Oh-Ohs (I like that one!)?

Sir Isaac Newton called it “the foundation stone of the Christian religion,” this not-so-easy-to-decipher prophecy of Daniel 9:24-27.  It’s connected, “determined” or “cut off” in biblical terminology, from a much more extensive prophecy in Daniel 8 which includes a symbolic ram, goat, little horn and 2300 prophetic days or literal years.  The angel Gabriel had explained to Daniel what the ram, goat and little horn stood for, and informed Daniel that the 2300 days/years would reach “to the time of the end.”  Then after Daniel’s extended prayer in chapter 9, Gabriel returned

Boy—even our Santas are in trouble. At its recent conference in Philadelphia, the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas (that really is their name!) declared that their priority this Christmas is not keeping their long white facial growth curly and clean. Their number one concern is H1N1. Come to think of it—that’d be your chief concern and mine, wouldn’t it—given all the little runny-nosed tikes sitting upon your rotund lap and cheerfully coughing and sneezing straight into your cherry-cheeked face!

“I complained to God that I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.” That dusty line from Thanksgivings past finds fresh meaning in Derek McGinnis’ new book, Exit Wounds: A Survival Guide to Pain Management for Returning Veterans and Their Families. November 9, 2004, Navy corpsman McGinnis was in Fallujah, Iraq, racing in an ambulance to pick up injured Marines, when a Mercedes Benz packed with homemade explosives crashed into his side of the ambulance, severing his left leg above the knee and exploding shrapnel into one eye.

While the nation continues to mourn over the senseless Fort Hood tragedy last week, let us be cautious about jumping to at least one conclusion. Thirteen families grieve the deaths of their soldier loved ones tragically killed on homeland soil, and one family grieves the yet inexplicable actions of a loved soldier who “snapped” into that killer. But exacerbating the post-mortem analysis is the fact that the alleged killer was not only an Army psychiatrist, but a Muslim, soon to be deployed to Afghanistan. Was it Nidal Hasan’s faith that prompted his actions?

Amen to AMEN! Karen and I had the privilege of joining several hundred physicians and dentists and their families this past weekend in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. You should’ve heard their stories. Here they are—medical professionals in the thick of their careers across this nation—pursuing Christ in the marketplace of health care. Or, as dentist Dusong Kim described it, it was Christ in hot pursuit of him, as the Cessna twin engine he was piloting in the dark over an invisible patch of California below, dropped out of the night sky, its engines shut down.

“20 reasons America has lost its soul and collapse is inevitable.” Not exactly the sort of headline that CBS’s staid economic website, MarketWatch.com, is used to running. In a sobering, columnist Paul B. Farrell opens with the pronouncement, "We've lost 'America’s soul.' And worldwide, the consequences will be catastrophic." He suggests it’s a gut sense we all have: "You know something’s very wrong: A year ago, too-greedy-to-fail banks were insolvent, in a near-death experience.