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Living in the Mess: The Problem With Outcome-Based Christianity

My post about the orphan crisis and world missions is up at Red Letter Christians today. I’ve always struggled a little with that post, feeling that it didn’t quite express what I wanted to get across, so imagine my delight when a commentor said something that clarified the issue for me. “I think something else […]

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Going There: Another Take on the Orphan Crisis

It’s been just over two years since a magnitude 7 earthquake hit Haiti, killing more than a quarter of a million people and leaving thousands of children orphaned, overwhelming a nation already in crisis. Kristen Howerton, who has adopted from Haiti and was in the country when the earthquake struck, wrote a great, heartbreaking post on “Rage […]

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Is Jesus the Anti-Santa? Kids, Ministry and Super-Sized Sacrifice

I know I wasn’t going to blog this week, but my blogging button got pushed, hard. First, I saw a video of an absolutely adorable little girl who is “donating” her birthday to raise money for the famine in the Horn of Africa. Right after that, I saw a post on Facebook discussing the best […]

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Why I Am (Almost) a Pacifist: Liberia and the View From Under the Bed

Liberia has not been leaving me alone for the last month or so. I haven’t been there since 1988, since I was a confused, hurting 11-year-old with nut brown skin and white-blonde braids. But it has been chasing me down. I have a post up today at Red Letter Christians that explains my thoughts about […]

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“It’s more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier…”

The PBS documentary “Women, War & Peace” will be starting tonight. I never watch television, but I will be watching this. Check your local listings to see what time it will be on in your area. Watch the full episode. See more Women War and Peace.

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Liberia, the Nobel Peace Prize, and Me

On Friday, three women were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their commitment to women’s rights. Two of those women, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee, were from Liberia, the country I called home for most of my elementary school years. I haven’t stopped grinning since I heard the news. See, it was in Liberia […]

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Has Jesus Wrecked Your Life? Katie Davis and the Tale of Two Kingdoms

Have you heard of Katie Davis? The 19-year-old class president and homecoming queen from Nashville, Tennessee who “quit her life” to begin a ministry in Uganda and become a foster mother to 14 girls? Katie’s new book was released on October 4th, and if I didn’t have a stack of books a mile high to plow through […]

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Reckless

I linked to a post on her blog once before, but can I just suggest that everyone hop over to Katie Davis’s blog a couple times a month? Oh. My. Gosh. She’s a young, twenty-something girl who followed God’s call to Uganda, and his next call to simply stuff her home full of children who needed help. […]

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Katie Davis Throws Down the Gauntlet

Well, I was going to write a blog post today, but I stumbled across one that was FAR better than anything I was going to write, and decided to share that with you instead. It has nothing to do with what I was going to blog about, but these challenging words from a twenty-something American […]

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Who Took the "Christ" out of "Christian"?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it really means to be a Christian, and about the challenges of being or calling oneself a Christian in American society. As a missionary kid in Liberia, I had friends from many different nations, cultures, and faiths, and was faced early with the fact that many good, […]

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Emotional Vomit–Proceed with Caution

I am halfway through the book “The Irresistable Revolution” by Shane Claiborne, and it is making me cry. Shane is one of the founders of “The Simple Way” in Philidelphia, a community committed to–well, you’ll have to read the book. Peace. Non-violence. Living in community, friendship, and solidarity with the poor and homeless, while trying […]

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