Barry's Blog 

It's been nearly 60 years since Billy Graham led his first major evangelistic crusade. At 89 and slowed by Parkinson's disease, Graham spends most of his time at his North Carolina mountaintop home. In an interview appearing in the Huffington Post, reporter Janet Kinosian asked Graham about facing his own last days, and those of his wife, Ruth, who died in June.  Quite revealing...

Losing a longtime, beloved spouse is one of life's most difficult and stressful events, and no one really knows what it means emotionally until it happens. Given your strong faith, have you been surprised by the strength of normal grief emotions?

Ruth's health had been declining for years, and in fact she almost died the first of this year. So her death on June 14 -- just four days after her 87th birthday -- wasn't a surprise. But what has surprised me is that no matter how prepared I thought I was, my grief has been very real -- at times almost overwhelming. I feel as if part of me has been ripped out, and in a sense that's what has happened, because Ruth was such an important part of my life.

Over the…

An article in this Monday's USA Today opinion column,"God Goes to the Office," written by Lake Lambert, a Board of Regents Professor in Ethics Wartburg College, raised a number of interesting points about the new "workplace spirituality movement." Lambert observes that:

"According to the workplace spirituality movement, creativity at work is a spiritual process that involves the whole person and not just the intellect or manual skill, and the new class of knowledge workers is devoting more of their time to work because they find deep meaning and a sense of purpose on the job. Today, clergy from various traditions serve as corporate chaplains, and the new faces of spiritual leadership are organizational development consultants who lead employees through creativity-enhancing spiritual practices. Overall, the contemporary workplace is regarded as a community, open to spirituality in the same way that it is hospitable to friendship and love."

Lambert goes on to survey the religious landscape in corporate America, noting how in recent years evangelical Christianity has taken a prominent place in the office boardroom. He mentions founder Truett Cathy, the founder…

A number of months ago, I heard Christopher Hitchens debate the Oxford University mathematician John Lennox on the Christian faith at Samford University. Christopher Hitchens' 2007 book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, has made him arguably the nation's most notorious atheist. While his reasoning and arguments in that debate were in my opinion weak, he still proved to be a formidable provocateur, often receiving applause for his quick wit and charm at the podium. Already renowned as a political columnist for Vanity Fair, Slate, and other magazines, and known for his frequent contributions on the political TV circuit, Hitchens' barbed attacks against all religion has earned him regular debates across the country, often with the very fundamentalist believers his book attacks.

As a precursor to his January 5 appearance at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Portland Monthly invited Hitchens to a conversation with a liberal believer-Marilyn Sewell, the recently retired minister of the First Unitarian Church of Portland. Sewell is a former teacher and psychotherapist and the author of numerous books, who over 17 years, grew Portland's downtown…