By Jim Nichols It is one thing to feel that no one knows who you are when you are alive; it is another when no one knows who you are when you are dead. In his compelling book Solito: A Memoir, Javier Zamora allows us to follow him as a nine-year-old boy on his two-month journey from his home in

By Jim Nichols The veterinarian’s waiting room contained the predictable collection of people and animals. Most were well-behaved (people and animals); a few were anxious, but the noise level was tolerable.  On one wall was a bulletin board with a half-dozen messages pinned on it. One index card read:  LOST CAT Lost Cat. Gray and white color. Left ear mostly

By Jim Nichols Barbara Brown Taylor is a wordsmith who can pack a sermon into an amazingly small number of keystrokes. In a short essay titled Life-Giving Fear, she wrote the following which I have paraphrased: “It is not a bad thing for us to feel the full fragility of our lives. It is not a bad thing for us

By Jim Nichols Because I am a career biologist and a Christian, like others with that pairing I have answered the same question multiple times. That concern is how I can reconcile evolutionary theory with a serious reading of the Bible, specifically, Genesis. Although this has not been a significant problem for me, it is clearly on the minds of

By Jim Nichols Many of us (including me) have wonderings circulating through our brain that have been there from childhood into adulthood. One question for me is why humans tend to create boundaries that have no meaning or rationale at all. What purpose does that boundary perform or satisfy? Often, it involves a bit of unnecessary geography. During football season

By Jim Nichols It appears to be a child’s toy, small pieces that seem to relate a story that you get to make up as you play. “Invented” in the 1890s in Japan, they were adopted by Russian society soon and are often known as “Russian dolls” or “Matryoshka dolls” today; a more descriptive term is “nesting dolls.” Originally made

By Jim Nichols Several months ago, I recounted here an unusual experience that occurred in my backyard. It was somewhat of a wildlife fantasy and involved the simultaneous presence of two visitors, a squirrel and a hawk. It featured a device referred to by the seller as a “wildlife language translator.” The instructions were not too clear as to whether

By Jim Nichols “I’m a new driver,” she said plaintively. “Please help me. I don’t know how I did this, but I am afraid if I move the car anymore, I will scratch both. What will my father say?”  She was panicked—waving her hands wide-eyed. I had a meeting on the campus and was simply walking through the parking lot

By Jim Nichols All of us who read the Bible have at least one thing in common: we skip over parts that are uninteresting to us. One example is lists of names, often appearing at the beginning or ending of a letter. The book of Romans concludes with greetings to at least twenty-five individuals, only a few of whom we