Great storytelling builds conviction through empathy. It doesn’t preach or resort to rational argument; it simply engages us with depth in the shared human experience. Great storytelling makes us better people in that it expands our horizons to include the excluded other. The greatest challenge of the marginal is their invisibility. Those with the greatest needs are not seen. It is not without purpose that the stories of Jesus’ compassion always included looking first, feelin

Why should we care about historical biopics such as HBO’s mini-series Gunpowder? Is it because it stars Kit Harington—the heartthrob Jon Snow of Game of Thrones fame? Is it because of its message of religious bigotry and violence? This is a British story exported to the U.S. Its resonance here will be very different from the U.K. where it played last October on BBC. The Gunpowder Plot is celebrated annually in England as Guy Fawkes Day. It is the British equivalent of our 9/1

A romanticized nativity does not serve Christianity or modern people well. We present a saccharine Christmas story and then wonder why it seems so childish and irrelevant to our adult messy lives. Luther penned of Jesus, “no crying he makes.” Really? He was never hungry or wet or colicky? U.S.A Today reports that this year, people are experiencing “more jingle, less Jesus.” About half of millennials disbelieve the central aspects of the Christmas story. One wonders what story

The New York Jets despise the New England Patriots. It’s a visceral rivalry. The New Copernicans, the forthcoming book on millennials by David John Seel, Jr., claims that the survival of the church is dependent on the church’s response to millennials. It’s a claim like the New England Patriots survival is dependent on the New York Jets. One might immediately conclude that if this is the case, the game is over. For with “friends” like this who needs enemies. This is an audacio

“If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time,” so warns motivational speaker Zig Ziglar. It is critical in any business enterprise to know your audience. Within 30 days, Thomas Nelson Publisher, a division of Harper Collins, will release my forthcoming book, The New Copernicans: Millennials and the Survival of the Church. Over the course of the next few weeks I will be addressing the following questions about the book. Who is the book for? How do you substantiate the au

It is both a sign and a test. When I designed the logo for New Copernican Conversations, my blog about the significance of the millennial generation to the church and the wider world, I depicted a yen and yang symbol in a coffee cup. One's reaction to this symbol is a good indicator of whether one holds a New Copernican sensibility. New Copernicans view the world in both/and terms, with a holism that rejects either/or binary categories. And so the yen and yang symbol is appro