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Dear Derek: I have not forgotten the day we learned that you would be coming to live with us. I was sitting in my office at Oberlin and Mom called....

Sarah Coakley came to Harvard in 1993, hired as part of then-dean Ronald Thiemann’s plan to bring more religiously committed faculty to Harvard Divinity School....

Every year around this time, the fescue pastures surrounding my home become suddenly colorful, as the purple heads of nodding thistles (Carduus nutans) break through the waves of green....

White House spin masters have discovered the beauty of the sea....

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil,” wrote Eric Hoffer in The True Believer....

Mark's account of the beheading of John the Baptist is a sordid tale of anger and revenge, resentment and death. Jesus is never even mentioned. The key to understanding why this sorry saga shows up where it does in Mark's Gospel is its relation both to the growing fame of Jesus and the success of his disciples. John's death foreshadows Jesus' death and the deaths of many of the early followers.

Yielding to increasing pressure to show the Arab and Islamic worlds (and much of Europe) that he is sensitive to the plight of the Palestinian people, President George W....

Even with Paul's wish to serve, even with his good motives, the Lord does not answer his prayer as he asked or expected.

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German and French prison rules require prisoners to be addressed respectfully as "Herr So-and-So" or "Monsieur So-and-So." Prisoners also receive good health care and even paid vacations....

In my work as a state prison chaplain I sometimes receive phone calls from zealous, well-meaning Christians who want to come "preach to the prisoners." My usual response is to smile benignly at the...

Mother Teresa poses a perennial problem for evolutionary biology. How can one explain her selfless giving when natural selection drives us to be selfish?...

The latest animated feature from Pixar, Finding Nemo, has all the trademarks of its imprint, which produced A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., and the Toy Story movies....

We’ve received a small but steady stream of letters objecting to the advertisements in our pages for military chaplaincy....

Alice O’Connor, a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says that her students laugh when she talks about how Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “war on poverty” in the 1960s....

Even before the invasion of Iraq had begun, the cry went forth through and from the churches: Pray! Pray for the soldiers, pray for the civilians, pray for peace. So I preached, and so I did....

Are the poor blessed or lazy? The prevailing answer in America is lazy. The welfare revolution of the past decade put the poor to work....

Funding for the 1996 law that changed welfare had an expiration date of September 30, 2002. So last year, Congress had an opportunity to renew and revise the system....

Welfare reform has triggered experimentation by states, which are responsible for its administration, and copious research about what works....

Postmodernism means different things in different contexts....