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Early last month, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan presided over the opening of a new synagogue, mosque and church—the last partitioned into Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox sections—in...

The major accrediting agency for schools in the South has placed a Louisiana Baptist college on probation for a year for violating the agency’s standards, partly for what it called the undue influe...

The Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment says its national clergy sabbatical program will continue for a sixth year in 2005....

Anthony Flew, 81, a British philosopher who has long championed atheism, has changed his mind about the existence of God, at least in a limited way....

When fairy tales begin with the familiar phrase “Once upon a time,” they signal a mythical point of departure: the beginning of a great adventure. If Matthew had known this phrase, he might have employed it to introduce the calling of the first disciples, since his version of this story begins with the breathless anticipation of a fairy tale.

Observers of the Christian calendar celebrate Christmas for 12 days after December 25....

Gothic cathedral. A gay couple approaches holding hands. “Step aside, please,” say the muscle-bound guards. They speak similar words to an African-American girl, a Hispanic man, a young man in a wheelchair. Then, just as we realize that the two large men are “church bouncers,” the scene fades to black and the tag line reads: “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.”

It was a few weeks after the election, and the question came at the conclusion of a report I had made to the university trustees....

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I am weary of parish consultants who offer pronouncements of doom, demise and decline; forecast futures based on generic ...

David Kling is interested in how interpretations of the Bible have influenced history and how historical context has sha...

Paco Underhill, a marketing enhancer, and Michael Dawson, a critic of the capitalis...

Purporting to deliver the straight goods on modern sexual interactions, Closer is glossier than last summer’s similarly themed We Don’t Live Here Anymore, and it has a more impressive...

It is hard to be moved anymore by films about concentration camps....

By exploring the contradictions between official theologies and the actual behavior of religious communitie...

Let’s call her “Susan.” She’s a 40-something woman who works at the convenience store near our church....

Inevitably, in the course of a pastoral career, one encounters that person—the spouse of an active member, or an avid golfer—who claims not to need to attend weekly services because “I can worship God in nature.” Possible comebacks range from mild to sarcastic, but they rarely make any impression. A better question is whether the assertion is correct.

The prophet Isaiah, whose words we read in Advent, gives us wonderful images of peace and of the restoration of Zion—images of the wolf living with the lamb, of waters breaking forth out of the wil...

After the U.S....