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Matthew’s story of Jesus walking on the water with Peter can spawn bad theologies.

I can’t imagine absolute silence. Even when I’m in a quiet place, my mind produces its own ghostly, seashell sound. The noise in my head is a faint but high-pitched whine accompanied by a lower rumbling that sounds like an engine pulsing away in the distance. These are the default sounds of my brain—what I hear when there is nothing else to hear.

Ten years ago Rebecca Chopp described how women’s voices and feminist practices were transforming theological education and the church. Women, she said, were “doing saving work.” At a time when the diversity of feminist theology defies tidy definitions and agreed-upon agendas, “doing saving work” suggests what’s afoot in feminist theology today—bold reinterpretations of Christianity that seek to renew the life of the church and its witness to the world.

The key to building a congregation of people from diverse ethnic backgrounds is to appeal to them in ways that trump their differences.

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Throughout the years when the religious right was plotting for political power, there was a quietly subver...

The alliance between conservative Christians and Jews seems bizarre, even surreal, to many people....

This book is radical in a couple of senses of the word, including the original one of “returning to the roots.” Purv...

Life after death is not quite a complete history of the afterlife in Western religion....

Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds churns up an emulsion of suspense and horror that engulfs you with the gray relentlessness of a low-grade fever....

Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds churns up an emulsion of suspense and horror that engulfs you with the gray relentlessness of a low-grade fever....

I am an avid reader of graduation speeches. A graduation speaker must convey an idea under difficult conditions and in a short time—an almost impossible challenge....

Americans who don’t vote might consider their voter’s registration card expendable. And some might say that the resources of a public library are expendable too.But when something is taken from us, we realize its value. That’s what happened in Salinas, California, when word leaked out that budget cuts were forcing the city to shut down its public libraries.

The preferred form of worship in many congregations consists of a welcome, 20 minutes of singing contemporary music, then a special musical performance and a sermon. Whatever else happens is secondary to “disseminating information people need in order to gain more control over their lives” and to ensure that they achieve “individual happiness. (Never mind that control is an illusion and happiness is transitory. See Ecclesiastes.)” Sally Morgenthaler (Theology, News & Notes, Spring).

After a former seminary president was defrocked for presiding at his daughter’s gay wedding, the top official of the Reformed Church in America urged the denomination not to be paralyzed by disagre...

Advocates for church-state separation generally gave a collective sigh of relief last month when the Supreme Court ruled that the posting of the Ten Commandments inside two Kentucky courthouses is ...

The Emergent church movement—activities so loosely organized by design that many proponents call it the “Emergent conversation”—has succumbed to its own growing popularity and named its first natio...

The interim president of Baylor University, Bill Underwood, quickly acted on his first day on the job, replacing provost David L....

Usually when the words evangelical and poverty appear in the same sentence, the minister at the helm is Jim Wallis, Ron Sider or Tony Campolo....

Over the years I have attended many commencement ceremonies as a parent, occasionally as the speaker and this year, for the first time, as a grandparent....