Latest Articles
Slippery slope
When people remember the 1960s they usually think of Vietnam, cultural upheaval and assorted liberation move...
Our robots, ourselves
In Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg's film AI: Artificial Intelligence David is an android, created in the image of a human boy and designed to provide a couple with an emotional subst...
From Slogans to Mantras, by Stephen A. Kent
Historians have generally avoided the topic of religion in the 1960s, while sociologists often treat religion with charts and graphs but with curiously little understanding of what it's like actual...
Visual Faith, by William A. Dyrness
An "openness to spirituality is perhaps the most important recent development" in the visual arts, William Dyrness states, and he perceptively glimpses this openness in many contemporary artists....
Regulating Religion, by Catharine Cookson
Catharine Cookson, the director of the Center for the Study of Religious Freedom at Virginia Wesleyan College, has added a new approach to the range of criticisms of the U.S....
Sacred Geography, by Edward Fox
Archaeology in the Holy Land--until recently often called "biblical archaeology"--has been involved in the region's political struggles since the late 19th century....
Heartbreak City
Fritz Lang was already the most celebrated filmmaker in Germany when he made the silent movie Metropolis in 1927....
Period Piece
Cowardice in the movies is one of those all-too-human flaws that tends to get under an audience's skin as they sit in the dark and wonder what they might do under similar circumstances....
Distressed families
Families in spiritual crisis was such a dominant theme among the 26 films in competition at the Montreal World Film Festival that one suspected the selections committee was composed of zealous soci...
Paris to the Moon, Rowing to Latitude and The Island of Lost Maps
Surprise at unanticipated convergences and resonances is one of the delights of reading what you happen to toss into the suitcase hurriedly on the way out the door for a vacation....
Ordained to write
"I'm trying to be as honest as I can to my experience of God—and to my experience of the absence of God."
Mingled prayers: The Creater loves all and is Lord of all
Anniversaries of traumatic events carry an emotional power....
Required reading: The UNC Qur'an debate
Conservative christian activists have often been unwise or shortsighted in pushing their moral and religious claims in the public square, but their efforts have reminded secular folk that religious...
Homeland insecurity: Christians and the fear factor
When I told my family less than a year ago that I was going to move to Chicago to work for the Christian Century, one family member protested....
Time for God: Devotions for children
Besides being colleagues at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Susan R. Garrett and Amy Plantinga Pauw are friends and the mothers of young children....
Ordained to write: An interview with Frederick Buechner
Frederick Buechner, 76, is a Presbyterian, but he attends an Episcopal church. He’s ordained, but he’s never been a parish minister....
Abraham’s brood: Abraham had eight sons, not one
When John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, I was sitting in Miss Wyatt’s seventh grade classroom at Tuscaloosa Junior High School....
Tourist trap: When religion is identified with nation
The Jewish Agency for Israel reports that in 2000, 6,460 North American Jewish teenagers traveled to Israel on what Newsweek recently described as formative trips “to cement Americans’ conne...
Strange conceptions: Out of context
The Holy Ghost is a pedophile. No, that opener does not mean that I have gone off half-cocked or whole-cocked. Blasphemy is not my game, now or ever....