Latest Articles

When Congress returns from its month-long vacation in September, President Bush will ask members to agree to a package of more than $63 billion in military aid and weapons to our “allies” in the M...

The press has been making much of 29 binders and 2,400 pages of jottings found among the relics of baseball great Joe DiMaggio....

I can never read stories about Jesus and his closest conversation partners, the Pharisees, without remembering JOY with some bemusement....

        All will be well,         And all will be well,...

According to many Christian groups, pornography is a disturbing and increasing problem. A Promise Keepers survey found that 53 percent of its members consume pornography....

One of the strengths of my Anabaptist tradition is that it takes the Bible and biblical authority seriously but also expects believers, particularly younger people, to argue and raise questions abo...

The church’s hymnody too readily assumes that the potter-clay imagery in scripture is only about God exerting unilateral power and God’s people being passive....

        All will be well,         And all will be well,...

...

According to Stephen Prothero, America is both “deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion.” Personal belief in God remains high. Americans say that their convictions shape their public behaviors, and most support the idea of religious organizations participating in public policy issues. Yet surveys show that the majority of Americans cannot name even one of the four Gospels. Only one-third know that it was Jesus who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and 10 percent think that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.

For four decades, Robert Bellah’s books, articles and public speeches have influenced thoughtful sectors of American faith communities....

Nostalgia is inherently selective....

Constantine’s act of “calling himself a Christian and pouring in that flood of wealth and power on the church,” ...

Ever since the 1970s the theologies of distinctive groups of Christians have aroused muc...

A meteor from the universe of Wystan Hugh Auden flashed into the atmosphere of American culture in 1994 when “Funeral Blues,” a poem written in 1936, was recited i...

...

“And now a few words from our president.” The countless opportunities that the president of a seminary has to make himself heard could produce nothing more...

Growing up in the Greek Orthodox Church, I learned to confess my sins by kneeling directly in front of the priest. I had no reason to believe that other churches handled this sacrament differently. When I first saw Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, I was mesmerized by the scenes of Death and the Knight talking to each other, in part because they were sitting in some sort of booth with a small door between them. What a great cinematic concept, I thought. When I later visited a Catholic church for the first time and saw the rows of confessionals, my response was, “They stole the idea from Bergman!”

David Bowie called them his favorite iPod download. U2 used their song “Wake Up” as the walk-on anthem for their last tour....

Along my office hallway a sign has been mysteriously posted: HOSPITALITY NOT HOSTILITY....