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God's Politics

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It is Sunday night, and I am suddenly awake at the crack of too-close gunfire. I creep to the window without turning on the light, more curious than afraid until I remember I don’t know if my daughter Miranda and…

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In 1958 the Teddy Bears released the song “To know him is to love him,” which might as well have been called “To know, know, know, him is to love, love, love, him,” since that’s the way everybody remembers it.…

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Categories: Ministry, Poverty

I’ve heard from many of you who liked last month’s post, or were at least relieved by its more positive tone. It turns out a lot of folks have been thinking all this ghetto reality is bringing me down, and…

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Categories: Ministry, Poverty, Race

Recently a bunch of people e-mailed me the same New York Times column, which cited a variety of scientific research suggesting that what we think of as intelligence is quite malleable in children and owes little or nothing to genetics. What…

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Categories: Ministry, Poverty, Race

I really like Marlena, but that doesn’t mean she is a good person. She is smart and easy to talk to, but only if you are talking about her stuff. She is attractive and has her hair done every week,…

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Categories: Ministry, Poverty

I often tell people not to ask me for statistics because in this work all the statistics are bad.  Ask me for stories instead, I say, because even in the worst of times I always have a good story.  Whether…

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Categories: Ministry

I stayed up way too late in a Buffalo hotel room the other night, eating string cheese and Oscar Mayer salami from the convenience store across the parking lot, watching the tail end of the Connecticut-Syracuse basketball game on television.…

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Categories: Ministry, Poverty

I want to be hopeful these days, what with Barack Obama just being inaugurated as our nation’s 44th president, but Tanya and Terry are making it awfully hard.  I know I shouldn’t let the problems of two little people here in…

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Categories: Ministry, Poverty

Need a good book? Check out some of these titles:

War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges. Very helpful to my effort to understand what draws people to street life.

Social Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman. Fascinating blend of…

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Categories: Books, Culture Watch

Twelve years ago our dear friend Julia took a badly neglected baby boy away from his crackhead mother and made him her own. That boy, Michael, is now a strong, quiet, menacingly handsome teenager who adores his “Mom” and grudgingly…

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Categories: Ministry, Poverty, Race

Dear Shane,

Your recent post is helpful, well-written, and -– to my way of thinking –- very thoughtfully irresponsible.  You do own stock in this country’s government, by accident of birth, so you have no choice but to help choose the commander…

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Categories: Elections

Good stuff from both of you, Ryan and Jimmy! Maybe my perspective is a generational thing, and you younger folks have transcended monolithic cultures of origin.  Or maybe it’s a generational thing, and you younger folks simply have a different experience and…

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Categories: Race

Remember Bobbie Williams, the tough but hopeful friend we sent to truck-driving school back in May?  

Well, the bad news is that Bobbie washed out of the course a few months later, after her adult daughter suffered complications in childbirth and…

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Categories: Ministry, Poverty

The other day Marty invited some neighborhood kids over to help with a mailing she brought home from work.  Before they got started, she sent 12-year-old Heather across the street to fetch 13-year-old Jasmine, who has been part of our fellowship from the very beginning.  Heather returned a few minutes later, alone and puzzled. 

“They were in there, but they wouldn’t open the door” she told Marty.  “Jasmine’s mother said you need to call her.” 

You [...]

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Categories: Ministry, Poverty, Race

I’ve been on lots of roads trips, but none of them compare to The Walnut Hills Fellowship’s weekend journey to Chicago.  Start to finish, it was a thing of rare beauty.   We had been talking about it for months, of course, but I think most of our neighborhood friends still didn’t really believe it was going to happen.  After all, people around here are always talking about things they don’t really intend to do.  [...]

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Categories: Poverty

I won’t even try to describe all of the maddening details of finding a HUD apartment for a homeless, no-income family that consists of a mother, five kids under the age of nine, and a nurturing father. It suffices to say that after three weeks of slogging through that kind of absurdity and ugliness, I began to understand why the mother, our friend Jaleena, tried to kill herself when her original building got condemned. Even with all that, we barely managed an awful apartment, and by the time [...]

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Categories: Poverty

There are plenty of times I miss running a legitimate ministry organization like Mission Year. Like when I’m breaking down my “office” every night so my family can eat at the kitchen table, or hand-addressing the envelopes for our donation…

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Categories: Ministry, Poverty

For as long as I can remember, I’ve ended my letters and e-mails with the encouragement “Keep the faith.” I must have picked that up from my father, since he’s the only person I know who signs off the same way. It might have been more lucrative for me to have picked up “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming!” instead, but I’ve always preferred the flexibility of the simpler phrase. Not everyone who hopes for God’s grace is a Christian, after all, and we who are surely hope for more than that. We [...]

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Categories: Poverty

We’ve gotten enough calls and e-mails from folks concerned about my state of mind for me to think it’s probably time for a more upbeat post. If you’ve been among those worried, you can rest assured that I’m far from despair. On the contrary, I can’t remember ever feeling more alive than I have these past few years in Cincinnati, in spite of all the trouble and confusion we’ve found here. My [...]

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Categories: General

No words can really communicate the essence of what we are doing here. For that, you’d need Smell-O-Vision.


In case you didn’t know, Smell-O-Vision was a system developed in the 1950s that released odors during the projection of a movie so that the viewer could actually smell what was happening onscreen. Thirty years later, cult filmmaker John Waters tried the same thing with scratch [...]

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Categories: Poverty

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