Lincoln Brunner

When I was a kid, I loved reading the paper, especially world news and the sports pages. The first journalist I remember reading in my local paper, the Rockford Register Star, was a sports columnist named Dave Albee. He was a great writer, and he lent a sense of humor and class to sports coverage that could otherwise be rote, vanilla page filler.

From Albee, I graduated to Mike Royko and Bernie Lincicome, two of the old lions at the Chicago Tribune. I ate up their syntax, their use of wit and language. I loved absorbing how much they knew about Chicago -- for a Rockford kid 70 miles away, the biggest of known cities. A lot of the old names from the 80s still permeate my memory -- Georgie Anne Geyer, Russell Baker, Peggy Noonan, P.J. O'Rourke, Anna Quindlen. Their writing and reporting left a mark on me because it rose above the fray in its intelligence, its insight into life and politics and people. In recent years, the work of Donald Miller and Timothy Keller (two of the best Christian writers working right now) has captured my imagination, as well as that of Philip Yancey, David Platt, Dallas Willard, Brennan Manning and others.

That's what I want to do with my reporting and book writing. I want to write about people whose stories focus a sharp light on the human condition, and specifically what God is doing to cut through the garbage that hampers so much of what we view as reality. There is a God. He is at work incessantly to bring people to himself and transform them into the image of his son, Jesus -- the only person truly worth emulating.

That's why I report. That's why I write. Thanks for reading.