TUCUMCARI, N.M. — After leaving Oklahoma City, we drove nearly 400 miles west on U.S. 66 to Tucumcari, N.M. Our plan was to turn north there and drive on back roads — what William Least Heat Moon called America’s “blue highways” — into Colorado, our ultimate destination.

Tucumcari is the only town of any size between Amarillo, Texas, and Albuquerque, N.M., so it’s where we stopped for the night. I was not hopeful we would find much here, but the city has made a career of serving as a way-station for travelers, and it makes the most of its location…

Lonnie Frisbee is a name mostly lost to history, but he could be one of the most influential persons in the modern evangelical movement. There’s no doubt that he is the man who put the “freak” in “Jesus Freak.” And in his life we see some of the best and worst of evangelicalism.

But to understand that, a bit of his biography is helpful.

Lonnie Frisbee was a quintessential baby-boomer, born in 1949 and fully immersed in the hippie movement of the 1960s. He was in San Francisco during the famous 1967 “Summer of Love,” and even then, at age…

The name Lance Sijan is virtually unknown to most Americans. But if you are a cadet at the United States Air Force Academy, memorizing Sijan’s biography is a required activity, and for good reason. Every American should know his story.

Lance Sijan was born as Lazar Sijan, the son of a Serbian father and an Irish mother. The family owned a restaurant and was active in the Serbian Orthodox Church. Lance, an athlete and good student, made his immigrant family proud by going off to the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he played football for three years. After graduating in…

NOTE: I wrote this article in October 2017 for “BreakPoint,” the website for the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. It is reprinted here on the anniversary of Alvin York’s birth: December 13, 1887

I am in Nashville, Tennessee, this week doing interviews for the “BreakPoint” and “Listening In” podcasts. As I drive around Middle Tennessee, I keep coming upon a name important in American history, but which sent me to the Internet for a refresher course in the life of one of the most remarkable “common men” of the 20th century. That name is Alvin C. York.

Alvin Cullum York…

NOTE: This article originally appeared at BreakPoint, the website of The Colson Center for Christian Worldview.

The death of John Glenn this week marked the passing of a generation.

He had a distinguished military career, serving in World War II and Korea, where he flew the iconic F-86 fighter jet. He became one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts and he was that elite club’s last survivor. He made history as the first American to orbit the earth. He was a central figure in New Journalism pioneer Tom Wolfe’s seminal book The Right Stuff. He leveraged his status as an…

The case for third-party and write-in votes.

Pharisees and partisans were always trying to trap Jesus into binary choices.

The Pharisees asked Jesus, “Should we pay our taxes? Yes or no?” (Matt. 22:15 ff). Jesus’ disciples brought a blind man to him and asked, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2) The thief hanging with Jesus on the cross, at a moment when the stakes could not have been higher, confronted Jesus with such a binary choice: Save yourself, or die.

But in these situations and many others, Jesus resisted the trap. He…

Pundits, partisans, and others have written much during this election season — and, increasingly, between election seasons — about polls and polling. Most of what has been written lately has been critical of polls and polling. Some have go so far to suggest that the polling industry is doomed.

This criticism is not new. Anyone who has seen the famous 1948 photo of Harry Truman holding up the newspaper proclaiming that “Dewey Defeats Truman” knows that journalism and polling have a troubled relationship. Some things have not changed since 1948. Journalists and pollsters still sometimes “get it wrong.” But the…

“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.” ― Madeleine L’Engle

A key moment in the last presidential campaign came early, in 2015. Hillary Clinton believed one of her political advantages was her long experience on the global stage. She therefore often talked about her tenure as Secretary of State. …