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In a surprise move, Massachusetts legislators took a first step toward banning same-sex marriages in the first and only state to make them legal....

The bongo drums and keyboard at Iglesia El Shaddai, a Pentecostal church in Elizabeth, New Jersey, are being played so briskly that they could support a conga line....

The two sisters grew up worshiping in the same church. Today, they feel like they still are—despite being in different denominations....

Congregations interested in increasing their weekly attendance would do well to make a plan for recruiting new members, become multiracial and make sure that serious conflict doesn’t take root....

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints removed the name of Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal from a list of those to be posthumously baptized, after the organization bear...

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, conceding that he wonders whether he should have been more involved in the antiwar movement, in a radio interview attacked the decision by the U.S....

The general secretary of the World Council of Churches, a body that opposes the death penalty, asked God to grant Iraq “the mercy, justice and compassion that it has long been denied” and “an end t...

Billy Graham has been named in the Gallup Poll’s top 10 “most admired men” list for a record 50th time. In a poll taken in mid-December, the 88-year-old evangelist came in fifth....

It was not a big surprise in 2005 when Southern Baptist Theological Seminary announced that it was making a “wholesale change” in its counseling program....

I was reared just a few miles from the University of Chicago on the city’s South Side. As a kid riding past, I was certain that its buildings were haunted....

The Nativity Story’s Christmas card tableau evokes every nativity performance we have ever seen. But there is no triteness, sentimentality or forced piety in it because we have met this couple in the grimy reality of their village, in the crowded streets of Jerusalem and on the rocky paths to Bethlehem. We know that they are carrying out a difficult assignment, and that their hardest work is still ahead: they have to raise this infant to adulthood. Along with the familiar, The Nativity Story delivers unexpected moments that inform and inspire.

When I was young I spent two summers “icing” refrigerated cars on Burlington trains....

Last fall a friend of mine attended a lecture at the University of Mississippi delivered by Stanley Hauerwas. His talk was followed by an invigorating, hour-long question-and-answer dialogue. My friend reported that afterward he and some students, another minister and several laypeople went to someone’s house and talked about God for another hour or so. How novel.

In Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow, the main character works to come to terms with who he is....