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The National Council of Churches said the Supreme Court ruling last month barring the use of military commissions to try detainees held at Guantánamo Bay is “a reasoned affirmation of what people o...

The American Jewish Committee has announced a program that will offer its employees bonuses of up to $2,500 for buying or leasing a hybrid car....

The international community needs “to take bold and novel actions to uphold international law and break the vicious cycle of violence” in the escalating Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to W...

With a call to minister to “a world in need,” the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship began its 16th year by appointing 19 mission workers, adopting a $17 million budget and contributing $32,801 to a sp...

The Unitarian Universalist Association voted at its annual meeting to keep the fight against global warming high on its list of priorities in both personal and congregational practices....

After deciding that ordaining women bishops is theologically justifiable, the Church of England on July 10 adopted a plan to explore the practical and legislative steps to make it happen....

A recent study by two Indiana academics suggests that Shari‘a law, the Islamic legal code often associated with strict rules, oppression of women and harsh punishments, has a softer side when it co...

The secret files of Pope Pius XI, who reigned at the start of World War II, will be released from the Vatican archives in mid-September, Rome has announced....

Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, the TV newsmagazine program hosted by Bob Abernethy, has been renewed for a tenth season this fall with a $6.25 million grant from its longtime suppo...

In recent years, certain religious Jewish and Christian communities have proclaimed that exclusive Jewish sovereignty over the Holy Land is a theological right and necessity, a condition for the un...

In the fourth century, a Spanish monastic named Egeria made an arduous pilgrimage to the Holy Land and left behind a diary that is the chief source of what historians know about early Christianity ...

For more than 20 years now, I have been in the business of telling the truth that is public....

Luxury, the dictionary tells us, is “the use and enjoyment of the best and most costly things that offer the most physical comfort and satisfaction.” In a special advertising section on luxury auto...

The church of my youth majored in a miserly view of God’s grace. Its message was grim. Life had no edge, no elegance and no joy, but was only a bitter temporal existence largely limited to preparations for the sweet hereafter. Our bleak church building reflected the theology: it was aptly situated in the Pacific Northwest with its endless days of dreary, overcast weather.

It is the day after Jesus fed the 5,000. The picnic is over and Jesus has taken his disciples to the other side of the lake. But the crowds of people who shared the meal with him yesterday and who then tried to turn him into their king are not about to let him go.

There are great gifts—both theological and musical—in the songs being sung in Japan and Peru and Zimbabwe. If those of us in the Northern Hemisphere do not within the next ten years sing the songs of Asia, Africa and South America in worship, our exclusion of them will be deemed racist. It will be seen as a case of musical apartheid.By joining other Christians in song, we in the body of Christ share the joy and the pain of fellow members, most of whom are black and poor, not white and affluent.

In his previous books Scott Sanders did much to deepen the public conversation about the sources and patterns that connect broken communities, damaged ec...

In this award-winning memoir, Joan Didion, a premier observer of contemporary life, witnesses death....

This is the fourth collection of poetry published by Mary Karr, who also authored The Liars’ Club, her best-selling memoir....

Following in the tradition of Spellbound (about kids participating in a national spelling bee) and Word Wars (about Scrabble players), the charming small-scale documentary Wordplay...