How countless are your works, O Lord. The earth abounds with your creatures! (Psalm 104:24) A dog can determine the direction of a set of footprints after sniffing just five of them. Scallops have 200 eyes, each one the color of a neon blueberry. A chicken will starve to death if you cover its right eye because the left eye only detects di...

Against the backdrop of blue skies, crashing waves, and steep, rocky cliffs, and clad in his iconic rust-colored jacket, Carl Sagan uttered perhaps his most famous quote. In the first episode of his acclaimed television series, Cosmos, he said, "We are made of star stuff." He was alluding to the awe-inspiring scientific theory called "supernova nuc...

Folks that have had the fortune to find themselves sitting under the shade tree at my family’s farm might have a hard time explaining to those who haven’t what takes place there.  For those who have, they always come back. People I sat with as a child, now bring their grandkids there.  Out of state grandkids bring their grandparents (who are...

What is wonder? For me, it is the mystical essence, the underlying beauty of something grounded in the physical reality. It is a quality that transcends the five senses, and inspires an awe that cannot be owned. Wonder is not quantifiable, nor can it be reduced into rational components, as it transcends reason. It always inspires the imagination, a...

Stress about work is common among men.  Whether it be from anxiety about providing for our families, a lack of personal fulfillment and a sense of meaning, or the everyday interpersonal difficulties that work often entails, it is a simple fact that our work puts a lot of pressure on us.  This is understandable.  We are, after all, creatures made...

I recently witnessed something tragic in, of all places, a LEGO Store. Things started off innocently one recent Saturday morning when I had the crazy idea to take my three-year-old and two-year-old to a nearby mall. I bravely ventured into this suburban consumer wasteland with my children for one ironic and noble reason: I simply wanted to play ...

Wendell Berry’s novel Hannah Coulter watches the breakdown of an agrarian culture through the novel’s namesake.  Hannah Coulter knows waves of life take us where we weren’t expecting, yet she knows too that as man drifts from life sustained on the land to life sustained by specialization and mechanization he drifts away from something he nee...

Land has a central place in the Bible. We spring from it and are placed within it deliberately by God: Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed (G...

At creation God looked at man and said he was good.  And He is not done seeing us.  His beholding holds us in being.  Were it possible for Him to look away from us we would not become nothing, but return to nothing.  We came outward, out of nothingness, thanks to the emanating goodness of God.  We were created with an orientation away from not...