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The National Council of Churches sent a Fourth of July declaration to President Bush to voice grievances over what the organization calls a failed policy in Iraq and a “dishonorable” war....

Putting behind them a controversial document, Pope Benedict XVI met with leaders of the World Council of Churches June 16 and reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s “irreversible” commitment to the searc...

The choice of Uganda-born John Sentamu as archbishop of York, the second most senior post in the (Anglican) Church of England, has been hailed in both countries, with a leading Ugandan newspaper de...

In an unusual turn of events, a Palestinian Authority committee of inquiry has cleared Irineos, the deposed Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem, of accusations that he was involved in leasing chu...

After two years of acrimonious debate, Canada’s House of Commons on June 28 passed a controversial same-sex marriage bill....

A new pastor learns about the church's annual tarrin’ party.

Scholars and church growth experts have been paying attention to Mosaic Church in Los Angeles, the subject of Gerardo Marti’s book A Mosaic of Believers: Diversity and Innovation in a...

I write this near the end of a doctor of ministry class at Columbia Seminary, where 16 pastors are exploring virtues for preaching....

Theodore A. Gill, onetime managing editor of this magazine, died last month. Mine is the only name remaining on the masthead from his time at the magazine 47 years ago....

When I speak in churches across the country, I often hear “former pastor” stories, or stories about struggles that involve a former pastor. What is this “former pastor problem”?...

Paul claims that no one is “out”—neither the people of Israel for not accepting the Christian story nor the non-Jewish people for not being part of Israel’s story.

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....