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While doing research for a talk on religion and violence, I kept running into accounts of people who selectively quote the Qur’an to show how it commits Muslims to killing “us” infidels....

The taxi drove past a mural of the American flag. There were skulls where the stars should have been and the words Death to America! scrawled across the stripes....

“The greatest joy of the pastoral ministry is service to a God who is as demanding and disruptive, as unbalanced and relentlessly loving as the Trinity.”

Marriage does not exist only for companionship or procreation or complementarity. It has a cruciform shape, like other ascetical practices, and is a transformative experience for the two individuals. In marriage, God intends not only to alleviate human loneliness but to effect human salvation.

Jesus called the young ruler to a new kind of material life, a life given to serving the poor with the “materials” of tears, blood and sweat. Clearly, this life is not marked by the kinds of happiness used to sell goods. But we do honor Jesus’ call in our culture when we honor volunteers and all those who serve others.

For 16 years I have lived under the jurisdiction of the Michigan Department of Corrections. I know firsthand what behaviors are being bred within prisons....

When I was a newly ordained pastor, I heard a speech by a federal judge. The judge said that he kept in contact with every person he sentenced to prison. His rationale was simple: he didn’t want his only impact on an individual to be the act of denying his or her freedom. Though as a pastor I visited hospitals almost daily, I had never been inside a jail. Within a few weeks of hearing that judge’s challenge, I made my first visit to the county jail.

You enter through a door in the back where a big sign says All Prisoners Must Be Shackled. New prisoners are admitted at seven in the evening. There are seven men waiting by the door tonight....

Reading the Bible with the Damned. By Bob Eckblad. Westminster John Knox, 2005. ...

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This book takes us back to the house church meetings of early Christians, meetings that “must have been noisy and bustlin...

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Ten years in the making, the new Encyclopedia of Christianity, edited by John Bowden, is a major scholarly achievement....

If I had not read Father Joe, by Tony Hendra, I might never have read How to Cook Your Daughter....

This volume consists of 13 interviews with people who were personally acquainted with Percy, the noted sout...

It was the age of levitations and decapitations, of ghostly apparitions and sudden vanishings, as if the tottering Hapsburg Empire were revealing through the medium of its magicians its secret desi...

A billion here, a billion there: Every two years or so the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi issues this claim: he could eliminate global terrorism by creating a “spiritual force field” with donations from billionaires (Chicago Sun-Times, August 29).

New fault lines are complicating the already daunting challenge of recovering from last October’s killer earthquake in the Himalayan foothills of northern Pakistan....

I am among those Israelis who are ready, in principle, for almost any concession that would end our conflict with the Palestinians....