At the end of the week, I will officially be done with something that has been a big part of my life for the past seven years. That ‘something’ was to work with people to help them find ways to engage in meaningful relationships and conversations across lines of religious…

Rhodesian Ridgebacks are fierce. If you aren’t familiar with the Ridgeback, it was bred to hunt lions. Yeah. Lions. Ricky Gervais accurately observed that the Ridgeback got a bad assignment when the genetic gods created it in his recent Netflix special Humanity. You also don’t need to imagine what centuries…

I’m sitting outside on my back deck (really its a wooden platform about 12 ft. deep in my backyard). It’s spring here in Colorado, my favorite season of the year. Right now there are two squirrels chasing each other in a desperate attempt to procreate — to make new life…

Thanks to Boyd In 2004, I found myself living in a part of the country that few ever even see unless they are on their way to Burning Man. The county has 9000 residents and is approximately half the size of the state of Illinois. And everyone owns at least one gun. It…

“Has anyone ever punched you in the face? The question caught me off guard as I walked an overdue children’s book to the library this morning. I noticed the guy walking the opposite direction on the sidewalk as I came to a stoplight. …

This morning, our daughter woke us up with a tinge of sadness in her voice. “I needed to wear brown to school today and I don’t have any brown”, she said. Thankfully, our son had a brown shirt (that was also clean) and the crisis was averted. See, today was…

This story is excerpted from my 2016 book Of Strangers & Enemies, pp. 165–170. A dialogical friendship is a reciprocal relationship that is mutually life changing and life giving. Let me unpack that sentence a little further. A dialogical friendship gives and receives; that’s what we call reciprocity or a…

We are all evangelicals of the worst kind. We are all deeply committed to our beliefs, and equally committed to convincing others that our beliefs are the beliefs that need to be believed. I was raised in a conservative Baptist Church in a relatively conservative town. In that context, evangelism…

One afternoon a while back, I was walking to work when I felt something on my sock. It felt like a tug, the kind you might feel when walking past a bush or a branch on the ground. …