Two samples of the kind of letters children send to Santa Claus each year, c/o The North Pole: Dear Santa: You did not bring me anything good last year. You did not bring me anything good the year before that. This is your last chance Alfred ******* Dear Santa: There are three little boys who live at our house. There is Jeffrey, he is 2. There is David, he is 4. And there is Norman, he is 7. Jeffrey is good some of the time. David is good some of the time. But Norman is g

I am seeing two broad and worrisome trends in the North American church today: a nitpicking, name-calling crankiness, and a shoulder-shrugging, yawn-stifling complacency. We have a surging tide of angry self-appointed prophets, and a sprawling mass of apathetic self-indulgent spectators. It’s not our finest hour. On the one side are the rigorists and dogmatists. They lather each other up, largely through blogs, into fits of vitriol. Their main activity is to ferret out and de