Last year, I walked into a nursing home looking for my aunt (one of the last surviving members of my extended family) and could not find her. I had not seen her for about three years, but I expected to see her much as I had left her some years earlier. When she was finally

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As renowned atheist Christopher Hitchens dies a very public death from cancer, he has declared any idea that might be reported of a deathbed conversion to Christ should be relegated to a man under duress from drugs and a disease that has attacked his brain. In an interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, he made

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When Sarah Cervantes moved to Edmond from Michigan one year ago, she knew no one outside of some relatives who lived in the area. The 29 year-old single mother of 6-year-old twins Aiden and Norah was battling cancer and often wondered how she would survive—both physically and financially. She had no job, and school was

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If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. —A Nation At Risk – 1983 The education system in the United States

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Yale University historian Harry S. Stout identified the dominant influence in colonial New England as the local church. In his book, The New England Soul:  Preaching and Religious Culture in New England, he reveals that the local pastor wielded great authority in the early communities across America precisely because his sermons were heard and later

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O Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am! Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing before you. Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath! —Psalm 39:4-5 Having worked at a funeral home

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