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Holy hilarity: The Lorraine Avenue Mennonite Church in Wichita, Kansas, celebrates Holy Humor Sunday the week after Easter because “God played the best practical joke of all on death, on Satan, in raising Jesus.” This year one skit involved a taste test to find the best grape juice for communion. The panelists in the skit were embarrassed to learn they had chosen “Real-Value Artificial Grape Drink from Wal-Mart” (Mennonite Weekly Review, April 23).

Imagine being a single parent who works as a nursing assistant at a hospital. You love your job, though your wages are only $9.50 per hour....

The massacre that took place at Virginia Tech last month can be only partially explained....

Make no mistake: Take James A. Forbes Jr. away from a pulpit and he is not himself....

Differences on abortion rights, stem cell research and even the veracity of evolution became evident this month among the Republican presidential candidates in their first major debate....

Robert Webber, one of the most influential figures in Christian worship during the past half century, died April 27 of pancreatic cancer in his home in Sawyer, Michigan. He was 73....

A proposed change in the United Methodist Church’s 25-year-old stance on homosexual behavior that would condone same-sex marriage “where legally possible” was tabled by a committee at the Council o...

A Portland, Oregon, couple that has refused for years to pay federal income taxes in a protest against warfare now is at odds with a decision of the pension board of the United Methodist Church....

Author-pastor Rick Warren is under fire for failing to discipline media giant Rupert Murdoch for owning and expanding pornographic channels for satellite TV....

Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola, who defied the top bishops of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion by installing his own bishop on U.S....

Iraq has been added to a “watch list” of countries requiring “close monitoring” of violation of religious freedoms, reports an independently run monitoring group established by the U.S....

Israeli archaeologists believe they have discovered the tomb of king Herod, the Roman-appointed king over the Jews who reigned from 37 BC until his death in 4 BC and was known for his monumental bu...

Brigham Young University, the large flagship university of the Mormon Church, has changed its honor code and will no longer list homosexual orientation or “feelings” as violations....

There is nothing like writing a book called Leaving Church for discovering how many things people can make of a title like that. The church of the title is Grace-Calvary Church in Clarkesville, Georgia. Leaving is what I did in 1997 when I resigned from parish ministry. In the year since the book came out, I have received thousands of letters, most so poignant that I have to hold my heart while I read them.What I read above all is a rich mix of love and grief: love for the mainline churches that have formed the faithful, and grief that so many of those churches have run out of holy steam. The love part makes the grief part hard to articulate.

Herewith,1 an2 essay3 on4 footnotes.5 Quote6: “Lomborg’s7 book,8 The Skeptical Environmentalist...

One of my seminary teachers once said that if you can’t think of anything original to preach, you should tell Bible stories—they have enough power to turn people’s hearts toward God. This may not work with every text, but it certainly works with the drama and wisdom of the story of Naboth and the story of the woman who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears.

One of the bright points in Barack Obama’s rising political star is his ability to talk about Jesus without faking it. But his enemies, including right-wing bloggers and TV pundits, are complaining that Obama’s church—Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago—embraces an Africentrism that is separatist or even racist. Just what is this Africentrism?

The Bible is full of strange things—oil cruets and flour containers that never become empty and young bodies that are restored to life at a word from Jesus. Are we supposed to believe that these things happened? Maybe the ancient peoples did, but we moderns suffer under the curse of Bultmann’s lightbulb: we know why the light switches on. We are cursed by rationalities that prevent us from seeing the Bible as one overarching story in which our own lives play a key role.

Wisdom seems like something you find after many years, something elusive, like an old Indian in a cave in the desert....

The Obama phenomenon is hurtling past the best analogies that we have for it....