Latest Articles
Dames and dragons
At the center of Lovely and Amazing is a dysfunctional family of mostly women....
All church is local: Behind the statistics
One of the reports the stated clerk makes to the General Assembly of my church when it gathers for its annual meeting is about statistics: how many members we gained and lost, how many infants were...
Rumor of war: Alternatives to invasion
The U.S.’s stated plan to take out Iraqi president Saddam Hussein is deeply troubling....
Praying for Sarah: When death is a blessing
Recently, I prayed for someone to die. She wasn’t an enemy. She was the beloved teenage daughter of two exceptionally fine church friends....
Paved with good intentions: The politics of national service
Last January President Bush announced that he was building on “a magnificent, courageous and compassionate response to terrorism” with the creation of the USA Freedom Corps, an initiative that comb...
The three Rs of urban mission: The New Song Community of Baltimore
When I visited a Baltimore neighborhood called Sandtown in 1997, my most vivid impression was that of disturbing, jarring contrast....
Name that God: In the Pledge of Allegiance
Before the recent fight over the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, Americans were in conflict over mounting the Ten Commandments in publicly owned places....
Siding with grace: Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32; Matthew 15:21-28
How do the blessed feel when they think of the damned?
Midwife's tale: Exodus 1:8—2:10; Matthew 16:13-20
The Hebrew midwives were poised to receive the future that God had promised.
A passion for progress
Though defenders of conservative evangelicalism, neo-orthodoxy and radical theology agree on very little, all would gladly dance on the grave of 19th-century liberal Protestantism....
The Death Penalty, by Stuart Banner
Our hottest, most divisive cultural arguments are often conducted without any awareness of historical context, as the debates over abortion and capital punishment attest....
Godtalk, by Brad Gooch
Two provocative insights surface in novelist and English professor Brad Gooch's introduction to Godtalk....
Business of the Heart, by John Corrigan
In this delightful look at Americans' penchant for public displays of religious emotion, John Corrigan proposes that American revivalism helped turn emotion into a commodity....
Muscular Christianity, by Cliffort Putney
The goals of the Social Gospel movement, the ideas of men such as G....
Napoleon's return
In a charming fantasia on how the last years of Napoleon's life might have gone, The Emperor's New Clothes—an adaptation of Simon Leys's novella The Death of Napoleon—...
A future in crime?
Despite its state-of-the-art computer graphics and eye-catching special effects, Minority Report is basically a chase movie built on a question—one that Charles Dickens explored in <...
Taking on the pledge: "Under God" religiously empty
A massive public outcry greeted the ruling last month by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declaring that the words “under God” in public school recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance violate th...
Whose land is it? Apartheid in Israel/Palestine: Apartheid in Israel/Palestine
On the long climb to Jerusalem I notice two kinds of trucks. One kind is carrying huge battle tanks still muddy from combat in the West Bank....