It’s Black History Month. The biggest book in my entire library is The Norton Anthology: African American Literature. It has 2,665 pages. Flop it open to the middle (like Psalms in the Bible) and you land on Langston Hughes—1902-1967.

In 1926, he wrote what became a manifesto for black artists of the time, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. . . . We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.

One of his best known and earliest poems is “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,”...

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Last November I blogged on my son Karsten Piper's poetry. I celebrated some of his awards and ended by saying "Perhaps we will post a few more of Karsten’s poems in the coming months."

Well, now that the winter issue of Rock and Sling: A Journal of Literature, Art, and Faith has appeared I am able to post one of the best poems I have ever read on a Biblical text.

I promise you it is not what you expect.

It’s called “Luke 18.25” and it won the Virginia Brendemuehl Poetry Contest from Rock and Sling.

Luke 18.25
by Karsten Piper

He spread his blanket on the sand,
kneeled and arranged his bowls and tools:
hook, mallet, clamp, chisel, rasp, razor. …

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The humble are happy when they see other people boasting in the Lord.

“My soul makes its boast in the Lord; let the humble hear and be glad” (Psalm 34:2).

The humble are happy when other people magnify the Lord with thanksgiving.

“I will praise the name of God with a song; I will magnify him with thanksgiving. . . . When the humble see it they will be glad” (Psalm 69:30, 32).

Why are the humble happy when others boast in the Lord and magnify the Lord with thanksgiving?

Because humility is most fundamentally a trembling love for the majesty of God and secondarily a trembling sense of our sin and smallness and dependence.

The h…

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Abraham Lincoln, who was born on this day 199 years ago, remained skeptical, and at times even cynical, about religion into his forties. So the most striking thing about Marvin Olasky’s recent article about Lincoln in World Magazine is to see how personal and national suffering drew Lincoln into the reality of God, rather than pushing him away.

In 1862, when Lincoln was 53 years old, his 11-year-old son Willie died. Lincoln’s wife “tried to deal with her grief by searching out New Age mediums.” Lincoln turned to Phineas Gurley, pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington. Several long talks led to what Gurley described as “a conversion to Christ.” Lincoln confided th…

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Was the carnage of this past week in the USA extraordinary? These things came at us so fast that we did not click on them. Only when someone assembles them do they take our breath away.

Consider this from AP National Writer Ted Anthony:

Ugly things. Violent things. Elemental things. Epic things. The forces of nature and human anger unleashed in concentrated form across the land. Water and fire, gun and sky, bringing destruction, death and misery. And tears.

America's body count for the week from Feb. 2 to Saturday tops four score. Fifty-nine dead from the tornadoes in the South. Five dead after Edwin Rivera opened fire on his family and a SWAT officer in Los …

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Al Qaida has moved another step toward western standards of abortion barbarity in using Down Syndrome women to blow boys and girls to pieces. The news is that this was not suicide bombing, but the detonation of retarded girls at a distance.

The disgust one feels for the kind of heart that does this could reveal to England and America how we should feel when we screen for Down Syndrome babies and then kill them. Compare the stories:

Story One: al Qaida

At Breitbart.com (and most news sources), it is reported that yesterday al Qaida used two women with Down Syndrome to bear the explosives under their clothes and then were detonated remotely killing over 70 people.

T…

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There are as many answers to this question as there are ways to do good and not wrong. “Love does no wrong to a neighbor” (Romans 13:10). “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:4). Here are some things that, it seems to me, need to be emphasized in our day.

1. Pray the fullest blessing of Christ on them whether they love you or not.
2. Do good to them in practical ways that meet physical needs.
3. Do not retaliate when personally wronged.
4. Live peaceably with them as much as it depends on you.
5. Pursue their joyful freedom from sin and from condemnation by telling them the truth…

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"You can be so interested in great theological and intellectual and philosophical problems that you tend to forget that you are going to die."

-Martin Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers, p. 193.

Here is the voice of my father for 4 minutes on how final salvation is contingent on perseverance, and yet eternal security and assurance are possible. It comes from an exposition of Colossians 1:21-23.

And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.

This is from the overflow of what I have been reading and …

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Surveys and statistics are maddeningly fickle. So don’t exult too much in what follows. I only cite it in case you have been discouraged or elated by surveys saying the opposite.

It’s better just to be a good follower of Jesus and not put your finger in the wind.

In the current issue of Books and Culture Jon Shields reviews the book, Who Really Cares, by Arthur C. Brooks which argues that religious conservatives (of all religious stripes) as opposed to liberals are more generous. Here are some quotes from the review.

Drawing on some ten data sets, Brooks finds that religiosity is among the best predictors of charitable giving. Religious Americans are not only much mo…

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