Latest Articles

When Keith Ellison, the recently elected Minnesota Democrat who will be the first Muslim in Congress, announced that he would take his oath of office on Islam’s holy book, the Qur’an, he provoked s...

Joel Hunter, a megachurch pastor in Orlando, Florida, has resigned from his pending presidency of the Christian Coalition of America, citing differences on how to broaden the group’s agenda....

The National Council of Churches has applauded recommendations of a bipartisan panel that has called for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq....

Defying worried predictions, Pope Benedict XVI ended a momentous four-day trip to Turkey on a high note early this month, celebrating mass for the country’s small Roman Catholic community and baski...

World Council of Churches officials have welcomed word that after 2010, the Lutheran World Federation and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches will no longer hold global assemblies of their own ...

The general synod of the Church of Norway has voted for the first time to radically change the Lutheran church’s relations with the country’s government—a break toward autonomy that may take six ye...

Relations between China and the Vatican continue to fray after the Holy See threatened to excommunicate a Chinese bishop recently consecrated without papal approval....

The committee that interprets religious law for the Conservative Jewish movement, the centrist branch within North American Judaism, has accepted a legal opinion that allows for the ordinati...

Many blame Rumsfeld and the neoconservative idealogues for the disaster in Iraq. But the current foreign-policy crisis vastly exceeds their mistakes. President Bush is still talking about “winning in Iraq” and “fulfilling the mission,” and his administration is still loaded with people who want him to stake his legacy on doing so. The neoconservative ideology of his administration is merely an exaggerated version of the normal politics of American empire. Before a significant change for the better is possible, Americans must reckon with the costs of the nation's perpetual war and military empire.

The verb regift was not in my vocabulary until this season, but now I see it leaping out from a sheaf of magazine covers....

In his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Jimmy Carter declares that “one of the major goals of my life, while in political office and since I was retired from the White House by the 1980 ...

The Templeton Foundation has often described its principal grant-making interests using the expression “science and religion.” “No more,” says Pamela Thompson, Templeton’s vice president for commun...

Things seem to be looking up for Nepal. On November 21, the government signed a peace accord with Maoist rebels, thus ending an 11-year conflict that claimed the lives of more than 13,000 people....

So where does Jesus ever say, “I’m the Son of God”? My cabdriver was pressing me as we careened through the streets of Birmingham on the way to the airport....

Have you not known? Have you not heard? asks Isaiah. Those with ears to hear, let them hear, says Jesus. Day to day pours forth speech, says the psalmist, but God’s speech is pitched in such a register that many cannot distinguish it from silence.

Once a year, having waited to the very end of December, my wife and I dress up. Some people wait a lifetime to start living, but fortunately for us, New Year’s Eve intervenes every year. With mortality staring us right in the face, we get around to that date we should have had months ago. Rexene looks absolutely stunning in a cocktail dress. (How many times does a pastor’s wife get to wear a cocktail dress?)

I’ve been setting up chairs at our church since 1991. When I began, we were meeting in temporary places—a school, a fire station, and even a bar for a time....

The fact that Jesus was a Jew has not gone unrecognized....

She died on Sunday, after a month of dateless days that began on Halloween and ended just short of Thanksgiving. We went from the hospice admitting office to a Halloween party in the family room, where volunteers offered us fruit punch, orange cupcakes and orange and black balloons. Three toddlers in identical ladybug suits were dancing on the faux-parquet ballroom floor to the electrically amplified folk songs of a long-haired balladeer.

Once a year, having waited to the very end of December, my wife and I dress up. Some people wait a lifetime to start living, but fortunately for us, New Year’s Eve intervenes every year. With mortality staring us right in the face, we get around to that date we should have had months ago. Rexene looks absolutely stunning in a cocktail dress. (How many times does a pastor’s wife get to wear a cocktail dress?)