Latest Articles
Churches in Canada defend sanctuaries: Call deportation process flawed
Canadian church leaders have condemned remarks of federal immigration and citizenship minister Judy Sgro, who earlier this summer called on churches to abandon the time-honored practice of providin...
Tale of two T-shirts: More connected than critical
Mom and Dad, you won’t believe what they put on the official T-shirt we bought....
Bear facts: Bad news for baldies
I have spent a lot of time searching through the Bible for loopholes,” said W. C. Fields, who was looking for moral wriggle room....
Stem cell rhetoric: A utilitarian view of human life
How do you marginalize religion and trivialize moral argument?...
Shrewd investment: Luke 16:1-13
In these days of Enron, Martha Stewart and wars waged over phantom weapons, we know better than to defend dishonesty. Then why would Jesus offer a parable lauding it? Upon closer inspection, however, this parable is just one in a long line of stories that Jesus tells about how to handle wealth.
Jesus creed: What is the focus of spiritual life?
Discipleship and disciplines: during the past 50 years these two words have expressed for many of us the quintessence of following Christ....
Christian skill set: The goal of youth ministry
The important question about youth ministry is not “Where are the kids?” or “What should we do with them when they show up?” but “What is the nature of our community?&...
Becoming church: A visit to the Ekklesia Project
For many years Stanley Hauerwas has been attempting to return the church to the center of Christian theological and ethical reflection....
Favorite poems
These days, as some people are bent on making war and others equally determinded to keep peace, I return to my former teacher, Yehuda Amichai, a German-born Jew who migrated to Palestine and grew u...
Clean sweep: Luke 15:1-10
The best storytellers paint pictures with words, using them to fill our minds with vivid imagery. I remember reading the first Harry Potter novel to my first-grade son. Each time we completed a chapter and I turned the page to start a new one he would shift in my lap and look away from the book. Finally I asked him what was wrong. He replied, “I don’t want to see the drawing on the first page of the chapter because I want to think about what things look like all by myself.”
Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context
Since Christians confess Jesus Christ as Lord, one might assume that most Christian ethics texts would ponder his teaching...
The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
How has the story of Noah and his three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, which contains no explicit refere...
Unsentimental journey
Seventeen-year-old Maria is a pretty Colombian girl frustrated with life in her small town....
Applauding diversity: Enough of one-religion nationalism
Protestants are about to become a minority in the U.S. after almost four centuries of numerical superiority and cultural dominance....
The real 'war' on terrorism: Greivances that must be taken seriously
What the 9/11 Commission accomplished is a minor miracle in this era of partisan politics....
Century Marks
Belated reconciliation: In 1525 Protestant Reformer Ulrich Zwingli preached against the Anabaptists, setting off persecution, exile and martyrdom of the more radical reform group....