I’m often frustrated by the Christian books marketed to children, and to their parents. The children’s Bibles are filled with fragmented stories selected apparently at random out of the Bible and illustrated with chubby-cheeked white-skinned cherubic children. The stories in fiction are stilted and artificial. The rhyming books… oh the rhyming books. Everyone thinks they…

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I just finished reading”The Council of Dads: A Story of Family, Friendship & Learning How to Live” by Bruce Feiler, which means I just finished crying and drying my eyes. Bruce writes the story of the Lost Year, during which he underwent intensive chemotherapy treatment, invasive surgery to remove a large section of his femur…

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I’ve decided to add book reviews as a regular feature here at Joy in This Journey. That said, I’m a novice. I have only written a handful of them, here (on grief), here (first review of fiction), here (on talking about pain in Christianity), and here (on prayer), so I don’t really know how to…

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Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. This is the Jesus Prayer, known and prayed most commonly in the Orthodox Church (though as one monk in the book points out, Jesus doesn’t pray this prayer — we pray this prayer to Jesus.) It’s very like the prayer of the tax…

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If you’re like a lot of us, you’ve thought about the chemicals and preservatives in today’s products and wondered two things: should you try to find products with little or none of those ingredients? Can you afford more natural products? One of my blog advertisers,

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