Latest Articles
Young, male and married: What search committees want
Churches seeking a new pastor tend to want a man under 40, preferably married to a nonworking woman who volunteers on church committees....
Teaching vacancies: A crisis in practical theology
When the longtime professor of preaching at Bethsaida Theological Seminary retired, no one at the school could have predicted the ordeal that lay ahead....
Story time: Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13
The Hebrews’ stories brought their lives into balance. Moses believed that remembering where they’d been, how they’d come into the land God promised, and what God had done for them would keep them faithful. So he said that in offering the first fruits of harvest, “You shall make this response before the LORD your God: ‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.’” Their story was a confession of faith, a community story that cast their thanksgiving into a framework that provided boundary and purpose to their lives together. It was a creed. Tell it again and again, Moses urged.
Reinhold's era
From the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s Reinhold Niebuhr spent his summers in the northwestern Massachusetts village...
Believing again
Marcus Borg has emerged as the Jesus Seminar scholar with the keenest theological sensibility and the most accurate read ...
A way to live
The Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith, based at Valparaiso University in Indiana, has been encouraging people to think about and live the co...
Christianity with an Asian Face
Peter Phan adds a Vietnamese voice to the growing diversity of Asian-American theology—a field once dominat...
Darwin's Religious Orthodoxy/Where Darwin Meets the Bible
Few scientists have been as influential and controversial as Charles Darwin....
Dead from the Waist Down
When such luminaries as Harold Bloom, Frank Kermode and John Hollander prepare the wa...
United by Faith
"Sunday morning is the most racially segregated hour in America,” the saying goes, and most past...
The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America/God and the Constitution
The cover of Frank Lambert’s book shows ...
Hanging out: Congregations are life-saving communities
References to Robert Putnam have turned up in many sermons in recent years, including my own, because of a timely observation he made, one that immediately resonated with pastors as both true and i...
The morning after: Distinct benefits of Plan B
In December advisers to the Food and Drug Administration recommended that a “morning-after pill,” previously available only by prescription, be made available to U.S. consumers over the counter....
Century Marks
Crisis on ice: A team of amateur Israeli and Palestinian explorers climbed a previously unscaled moutain in the Antarctic, and at the summit the six men and two women unfurled their national...
Expert advice: Covering religion
Religiously ignorant journalists.” That was the headline that accurately captured the flat-out judgment of an unhappy essayist in Books & Culture (January-February)....
Full house: Breaking a reproductive taboo
Though no cinematic masterpiece, Cheaper by the Dozen is not predictable Hollywood schlock. It is unpredictable Hollywood schlock....
A network for 'orthodox' Episcopalians: A church within a church
Dissidents in the Episcopal Church, angered by last year’s consecration of an openly gay bishop, have formally launched a new “network” to act as a church-within-a-church for traditionalists....
Griswold wore flak jacket at concecration: "Beware of an 'unblemished' church built upon judgment rather than love"
When Frank Griswold, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, suited up for the consecration service in November for the bishop of New Hampshire, he added something extra to his flowing gold v...
New ecumenical body aims for 2005 start: Christian Churches Together
Organizers of a daringly broad coalition of evangelical, Catholic, mainline Protestant and Orthodox Christians say they expect the organization will finalize its formation in May 2005—the first tim...