By JIM NICHOLS A university or school system has good reason to understand that students need to eat sometime around lunchtime. From an operational standpoint, the university or school system has a basic decision to make. The decision is whether the university or school system itself will operate the cafeteria or whether that function should be outsourced. Similarly, a university
Read moreBy JIM NICHOLS One of the best things about medical chaplaincy is that it is ecumenical. When I enter a hospital room, the patient and others in the room often ask, “What church are you from?” My response is to tell them where I usually am on a Sunday morning, but then to say, “But when you are a hospital
Read moreBy JIM NICHOLS One of the things humans just seem to do naturally is to compare our behavior to that of animals. We are good at this anthropomorphic trick—saying, “Look how that animal is acting just like a human.” Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist at Cornell University, suggests this is backward reasoning. “Thinking of animals like people is misleading and unhelpful
Read moreBy JIM NICHOLS During Jesus’ ministry there were several instances of healing; scripture deals with some of them briefly, but others are described with some detail. One in particular has spoken to me over the years. In Mark 9 there is a crowd around Jesus and a father approaches him and asks for aid for his son. He describes his
Read moreBy JIM NICHOLS Some of scripture is, frankly, difficult to understand. We have to wrestle with writers who composed in a vastly different time of the world and in different cultures. Clearly, in many cases, they are addressing issues that we do not know about and therefore we do not have much context for the words. We want to take
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