MOCKINGBIRD

We have reprinted below a chapter from Ethan Richardson’s This American Gospel: Public Radio Parables and the Grace of God. Ethan’s book, available here (or

My husband and I took a train trip recently. At the beginning of the journey, we found ourselves sitting in seats facing backwards. I asked if it bothered him and if he preferred to move. “No,” he said, “it’s okay. At least this way we’ll know where we’ve been.”

It’s an interesting way to experience train travel, not knowing or seeing what lies around the bend, and it ...

Christine Emba’s talk from our 2026 NYC Conference had us hanging on every word. As the author of numerous NYT and Post columns on modern love and the acclaimed 2022 book on Rethinking Sex, Emba is an expert and one of the very few to bridge the gap between the church and contemporary culture on these thorny topics. In her talk, Emba addresses the i...

Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the earth stand in awe of him. –Psalm 33:8

God is love, but the earth should fear him. In one place, the Bible describes our affective disposition towards God as abba, daddy; in another it describes it as fear. This seems to present a contradiction, and the phrase “the fear of the Lord” almost invaria...

You would think being a rockstar married to a supermodel would be one of the greatest things in the world. It is.
–David Bowie

This really is a lovely bit of misdirection. Instead of following the usual trope of admitting that even superstardom comes with its struggles, Bowie tells us, with a smirk, “Yeah, it’s about as awesome as you imagine.”

The quote is ...