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James and John McZebedee matriculated at my seminary again this fall. The “Sons of Entitlement,” I call them. They are usually—but not always—young and white in addition to being male. They have typically grown up in the church, attended Christian colleges and majored in religion. They like to refer to their mental index of Theologians Worth Reading and readily scoff at those theologians they have not read (and so are not worth reading).

Yes, the letter written by President Ahmadinejad of Iran to President Bush last spring is a political document, and is no doubt duplicitous, multilayered and deliberately deceptive. Yet the letter, framed as an address by one believer in God to another, received little sensible comment in the American media. Suppose the appeal to Bush to take his Christianity seriously is at least in part genuine. Can we American Christians hear this appeal?

This portion of the narrative is a continuation and expansion of what has just preceded. The other ten disciples are jealous, are angry with James and John because they have pushed Jesus—successfully—to give them a preeminent share in his destiny. Jesus has not criticized or dismissed their insistent demand but has lovingly transformed it from a desire for glory into a willingness to suffer. Still, why should some of the disciples be granted privileges over the rest?

Allison extends his earlier Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet with a series of essays...

African Christianity: An African Story. Edited by Ogbu Kalu. Department of Church History, University of Pretoria, 631 pp. ...

A retired Fuller Seminary professor, Anderson seeks to infuse the Emergent movement with an Emergent theology, drawing on Paul’s teachi...

Americans have sometimes seen the campaign against South African apartheid as a reprise of their own civil righ...

Michael Kazin, a scholar of U.S....

There is something very familiar about The Most Famous Man in America....

To read the papers or watch the news, one would think that sex and gender are the only issues facing Christians today....

This book documents a life interrupted....

When i finished this book I wanted to read it all over again. It’s that kind of work....

Only in retrospect do most people come to believe that they have lived through a historic moment....

Steve Zaillian’s adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel All the King’s Men, about the making of a demagogue—modeled on Louisiana governor (and later senator) Hu...

One of the messages my church sent me when I was an adolescent was: Don’t date Catholic girls; you never know where it might lead....

The first major public building to reopen in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina wasn’t a public school, hospital or courthouse. It was Orleans Parish Prison....

Knit together: Jacqueline Novogratz tells the story of a favorite sweater that she wore for years. When she was 12 she finally donated the sweater to Goodwill. Then, 12 years later, she was jogging in Rwanda and saw a small boy wearing a sweater. She ran up to him and took a look at the collar: her name was on it! For Novogratz, the experience confirmed the interconnectedness of the human family (Atlantic Monthly, October).

A recent article in the New Yorker about the race for governor in Ohio declared that the November election would “test the power of the Christian right.” It was not the first article to examine the Republican candidate, Ken Blackwell, and his ties to the religious right. As Ohio’s secretary of state, Blackwell led the 2004 campaign against gay marriage in Ohio, helping put “Issue One,” as the gay marriage amendment was called, on the same ballot as presidential contenders George W. Bush and John Kerry. Voter turnout surged, and Ohio, that ever-wavering swing state, swung for Bush. (Some say Blackwell’s control of the election apparatus also played a part.)But an even more interesting religion story unfolding on Ohio’s campaign trail this fall involves Blackwell’s opponent, Ted Strickland, a United Methodist minister.

Though fans and nonfans of internationally known wildlife enthusiast Steve Irwin had been predicting his demise for quite some time (how long can one tempt the leviathan without a bit of bad luck?)...

After varied efforts by Democratic leaders to convince mainstream churchgoers that they share common moral values, a Baptist ethicist has suggested that the Democrats focus instead on core biblical...