by Mark Beckwith | Mar 28, 2022 | Guidance
Self-righteousness can be a crippling disease. We saw self-righteousness on full display this week when one Senator after another tried to trip up Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson with their arrogant and aggressive questions. Except, for the most part,...
by Mark Beckwith | Mar 21, 2022 | Guidance
Questions, if not accusations, abound about the mental status of Vladimir Putin as he continues to wage war against Ukraine. Is he unhinged? Is he psychotic? Is he evil? Is he the willing stooge of a villainous Russian cabal which seeks to reap economic benefit from...
by Mark Beckwith | Mar 14, 2022 | Guidance, Inspiration
I first learned the saying as a boy. As a young adult I saw the images of three monkeys carved over a door at a shrine in Nikko, Japan, which gave it language: “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil”. We are seeing evil march through Ukraine and onto our screens...
by Mark Beckwith | Feb 28, 2022 | Guidance, Inspiration
Like most of us, my stomach is in knots over what is happening in Ukraine. Woven together are chords of fear, threads of indignation, and skeins of disbelief that Russia would wantonly breach international law, violate a neighboring country’s sovereignty, and make...
by Mark Beckwith | Feb 21, 2022 | Guidance
In 2009 journalist Bill Bishop wrote a compelling book, The Big Sort:Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. He makes the case that over the past several decades people have been living, working, worshipping, recreating, and vacationing in...
by Mark Beckwith | Jan 31, 2022 | Guidance
During my first year in seminary, I regularly commuted with a classmate to our shared ministry site, a Masonic Home for Senior Citizens, a twenty-minute drive away. She was gifted and committed, and as it turned out, deeply troubled. She made a couple of suicide...
