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Eostre, the Teutonic goddess of fertility with an Anglo-Saxon name, never did much for us except, perhaps, give her name to Easter....

Although the images of shepherd and sheep wind their way through these lectionary texts, they are difficult images for the contemporary church to embrace. I recall many of the adults in one congregation cringing during a children’s time a few years ago, when a well-intentioned volunteer tried to teach the children a song that had them “baa-ing” for Jesus. What are we teaching our children, some of us wondered: To follow the crowd without question? To have no mind of one’s own? To expect someone else to take care of us?

A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail message from a reporter who was working on a story about sexual abuse allegations against the former Roman Catholic bishop of Springfield, Massachusetts....

Christians tend to compare their personal conversion experiences to Saul’s encounter on the road to Damascus. Not all of us, of course, talk freely about what happened in us and to us on the way to becoming Christian. Our levels of comfort with such talk vary widely depending on our congregational culture, our notions of evangelism and our ability to be self-revelatory. But when we do think about that journey, and when we’re willing to talk about it, we say that our conversion was—or was not—a Damascus Road. We tell our young people that their experience does not need to be a Damascus Road experience, although it can be. There are many paths of Christian transformation—and the light from heaven is only one of them.

In 1976 Jerry Falwell got a phone call from Jody Powell, special assistant to Jimmy Carter—a call that launch...

However one assesses Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, the film has drawn attention to the death of Jesus in a way that preachers and teachers, who an...

The genteel French film Monsieur Ibrahim, directed by François Dupeyron, is based on the book Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, who also coscrip...

"I heard that when the tribulation comes...

Luke 24:1-12

In Elisabeth Sifton’s The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War, the author describes how Reinhold Niebuhr, her father, moved away from the pacifism that preva...

While churches continue to debate their understanding of homosexuality, the political debate on gay partnerships has moved dramatically toward legal acceptance....

For better or for worse: Intercultural and interracial marriages are on the increase, according to Marsha Wiggins Frame (Pastoral Psychology, January), and the trend is likely to incr...

Episcopal church leaders have reacted sharply to what one called an “unauthorized and clandestine” service in Ohio at which five retired conservative U.S....

The American Baptist Churches in the USA has reported the fastest growth of any Protestant denomination, according to the 2004 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, which compiled figures for...

Christian liberal activists have endured of late what might be called the political equivalent of the dark night of the soul....

The news in early March that all United Methodists could receive a free drug discount card with savings up to 65 percent appeared at first glance to be a bold health-care step by a major denominati...

Larry Swain, a Pittsburgh minister, is happy that he’s lost more than 50 pounds in a year and a half....

Certain assumptions have long been made about what makes for the strongest congregational life—for example, that megachurches provide the best worship experience or that the best churches generally...