On December 9, 1987, a squirrel chewed through a power line in Connecticut, and the NASDAQ’s vast financial machinery blinked, sighed, and went dark. Some of the world’s largest corporations stood limp and listless. Global economie…

In the American West in the late-1800s, the search for dinosaur bones created the Bone Wars in which two paleontologists battled one another in their pursuit of making the most historic find. One writer noted how the two “used underhanded me…

When writing teacher Peter Turchi sees a map, he looks for the adventure it holds. “To ask for a map,” he says, “is to say, ‘Tell me a story.’ ” I seized on that idea when preparing to teach a Sunday school class dur…

A woman was unusually nervous as she sat in the dentist’s chair. Family burdens troubled her greatly, and it was noticeable. Her dentist sensed her anxiety and asked her about it. Her story led him to ask, “Can I pray for you?” When t…

For a parent, the death of a child is devastating. But to lose two of your children? Unimaginable! Yet that’s the experience of Australian musician, writer, and actor Nick Cave. In 2015, his 15-year-old son fell from a cliff and died. A few years…

A young patient committed suicide because he couldn’t afford the bus fare to the hospital for mental health treatment. Distressed, Dr. Chibanda tested ways to make treatment more accessible. Friendship Bench was born, a program where therapists s…

A doctor decided to retire after treating cancer patients for nearly thirty years. While working with a billing company to resolve his clinic’s finances, he opted to forgive $650,000 of debt people still owed him. In an interview about this act o…

A fan of J.R.R. Tolkien posed a question to him in a letter. He asked why the heroes of the Lord of the Rings trilogy didn’t simply fly on the giant eagles into Mordor. In a later interview, Tolkien admitted, “It would have made the quest a…

When we think about New Year’s resolutions, what probably comes to mind is a list of lofty ambitions we rarely achieve (80 percent of New Year’s resolutions are already abandoned by mid-February). Author Amy Wilson suggests a better idea mi…

During our church outreach in a nursing home, an elderly resident told me of how his daughter had driven him there years before and simply left him on the sidewalk. In his wheelchair, Ed couldn’t get up to run after her. She’d returned to t…