Latest Articles

The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity 1900-1950. By Gary Dorrien. Westminster John Knox, 666 pp., $39.95....

The bedazzling first neon shots of Tokyo in Lost in Translation suggest a topsy-turvy version of Manhattan-weirdly familiar and yet alien, denser, even more vertiginous....

The history of the American heartland sometimes appears as little more than a bloody farrago of killing which, in the God-soaked vocabulary of the perpetrators, must be understood not as murder, bu...

At one of our church’s weekly staff meetings the youth minister said he had a problem and needed his colleagues’ advice....

A street preacher works a corner just blocks from the Christian Century office, loudly warning passersby of the wrath to come....

Youth culture in the U.S. is being reinvented every three years, according to Robert J. McCarty. Keeping up with youth culture is like mapping territory that is constantly changing, he says. ...

The current cohort of American teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 is lonely, spiritually hungry and intensely aware of the threat of violence....

The Puritans were earnest folk. They had little patience with those who had no depth, no deep conviction, no profound concern with what God was doing in their lives....

On October 5, Jonathan Edwards turns 300....

In his critique of “Living Faithfully with Families in Transition” (June 28), a report submitted to the recent assembly of the Presby...

Small differences in analysis and in the use of theological sources can make for big differences in conclusions, even among friends like Homer Ashby and me, who share many of the same commitments....

"Wonderfully prolific” and “as fine a historian as America now boasts” is how reviewer Eugene D....

When Erik confessed his faith on the festival of Pentecost, the entire family of believers watched and strained to hear his confession. His chubby fingers were surprisingly dexterous as he signed the words, and he also spoke, as if what he was signing was bursting through the silence of his deafness. This is what he said on the day of his confirmation: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not die but have life forever.”

Edgar lived alone in a welfare motel among prostitutes and drug abusers. He was a bit rough around the edges and would sometimes get loud and demanding. But for all his rough edges, Edgar was the only person who passed for a pastor in that backwater parish of broken souls. And there could be no more fertile soil for biblical "church growth" than the concrete motel parking lot and those waiting children of God with their wisdom "from below."

Are mainline churches capturing the imaginations of young people and leading them toward long-term commitments to the church? Or do they serve as revolving doors—...

Johnny Cash is considered a pioneer of “outlaw music,” yet even his secular compositions beat with a moral and religious heart....

Only one portrait of Jonathan Edwards was painted during his lifetime, a rather conventional “likeness” done by the Boston-based painter Joseph Badger....

One of my favorite lines in modern "religious" fiction comes from Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood....

There's an old saying that if you want to be a Methodist bishop, you shouldn't look like you want to be a Methodist bishop....

One of the most satisfying films of the year, Niki Caro's Whale Rider, is set in a small Maori village on New Zealand's eastern shore....