Are you curious? Why curiosity is a part of God's character Though He is all-knowing, this didn't stop Jesus from asking questions. In fact, he asked over three hundred! Some of these were rhetorical and solely a part of rabbinical teaching (even today, Judaism emphasizes asking questions!), but Jesus used this convention to draw out the listener and enable them to reply honestly...

What is prayer? For some, it may seem like this practice is reserved for pastors or your auntie or tia or tita  who never fails to bless every meal you share together. Or maybe it looks like something you learned in Sunday School or at a campus ministry -- how to journal and read the Bible together. Perhaps the only time you feel like you pray (especially out loud) is at small group...

Niwana Johnson hurls her fists. She shoves. And then she starts running.   She sprints away from the two women she had been fighting, heading for asphalt. She leaps into the street. She doesn’t see the car, but she feels it.   The impact sends her careening into the air. Bystanders say she flew 20 feet high.      Niwana doesn’t quite black out. It’s more of...

They sit around circular tables in groups, bent around white artist canvases they cover with magazine clippings and paint, the kind of colorful mixtures and shapes spotted at modern art museums.   One table’s canvas displays Chicago’s iconic “L” train and a palette of the city’s ethnicities and iconic food—hot dogs, deep-dish pizza. Another table’s canvas depicts...

A torrential August rain pummels Chicago, turning streets into wading pools. But inside a brick building three floors up in the city’s Andersonville neighborhood, the rain just serves as a steady soundtrack as Darlene and Jim Conner settle me at the dining room table of their apartment, offering me an array of tea bags and slabs of homemade Black Forest cake.   Their 20-year-old son...

How Chicago Navigators connect with prison ministry in Asia   Atop a concrete wall, jagged edges of bottles, brown and green, jab at the sky, translucent in the sun. They are meant to prevent escape.   Behind the wall, in a courtyard, hundreds of women roam. They wear two kinds of uniforms: blue and white if they have already been sentenced, and orange if they still...

Around 7:30 a.m., inside a brick house on the corner of Kimbark and Kenwood Avenues on the far South Side of Chicago, Colleen Brinkmeier gathers at a table with Debra on a recent Tuesday, just as they do every morning.   They pull out their Bibles, and each has brought with them a devotional, from which they’ll share a passage with one another.   A block away, 87th...

  James Kang moves through Southeast Asia with alacrity and aplomb, wearing flip flops and weaving through the streets without fear, stepping in front of the ever-present motorbikes weaving past him—often hopping on one himself—and greeting longtime friends in just about every country.   James had grown a silver-flecked, ebony mustache for the first time just before a...

When some people see an expo atmosphere, with swaths of tables set up by companies and organizations giving away free pens or t-shirts or other swag, they gravitate toward the freebies.   Not Nikki Janes.   Tables filled with freebies hardly ever appeal to her.   But one day at the start of her freshman year, she wandered the green space at the University of...

  Six years ago, James Brooks fell to the concrete floor of his prison cell. His “cellie,” or cellmate, usually never left during yard time. But that day felt different—and it was. That day, when the call came to exercise, his cellmate jumped up from his bed and threw on jogging pants.     “Where you going, cellie?” James asked him.   “I’m going...