On this weekend when the nation recalls the life and mission of Martin Luther King, Jr.—frail like every life, but focused like a laser on a mission towards the equality of all—it is appropriate for this community of faith to ponder that mission in the light of our own. Were Dr.

Look, I’m not suggesting that the just concluded Iowa caucuses and the upcoming New Hampshire primary are strategic pieces in some sort of apocalyptic end game.

The world in the West awakened on Monday to the news that while we slept the 69 year old recluse and quixotic leader of North Korea had succumbed to a heart attack. Kim Jong II was dead.

A few weeks ago Charles Schultz’s syndicated Peanuts cartoon went apocalyptic.

Don’t you love the Mike Water’s “Joyful ‘toon” cartoon Greg Offenback came across this week? Talk about one sophisticated sheep! Look at him (or is it, her). Catching some rays on his outdoor recliner and reading the latest “Sheep Digest” magazine—Mr.

I realize that the times call for a bit of creativity now and then—but this creative? In a Black Friday mad dash for an Xbox video game console on sale, a woman at a Los Angeles Wal-Mart last week neutralized her competition (twenty other shoppers) racing for that same electronic toy.

Nathaniel Philbrick, in Mayflower, his acclaimed history of the Pilgrims, recounts how William Bradford, the intrepid leader of that courageous band of Puritans, years later described “that first morning in America.” Recalling with wonder their landing on the salty, windswept shores of Cape Cod Bay on November 15, 1620, Bradford wrote: “But here I cannot stay and make a pause and stand half amaz

The sirens wailed by as I was out jogging early Tuesday morning. From their sounds, it appeared that not only our Oronoko-Berrien Springs volunteer fire department was responding, but units from nearby towns as well. Only later did I learn of the deadly fire that engulfed an apartment building not far from campus.

Remember that rhyme about Europe? “Austria was Hungary, very very Hungary, ate a bit of Turkey, dipped in Greece. Long-legged Italy, kicked poor Sicily, into the Mediterranean Sea.” (http://wiki.answers.com) Just an old memory device for school children? Perhaps. But for the nations clustered around the Mediterranean today neither rhyme nor reason seems to depict their plight.

Let me be quick to paraphrase the words of Amos, “I am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet” (see Amos 7:14). Truth is, living in the 24/7 news cycle of these tumultuous times, it doesn’t require mega-doses of prescience to make the following prediction here in this Fourth Watch blog.