Latest Articles
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....
Preaching from ground zero
Sermons are like fresh vegetables: best consumed close to the garden. They tend to lose their taste when packaged for the mass market....
In the Aftermath, edited by James Taylor
Stanley Hauerwas does not believe that the people who died on September 11 "deserved" their deaths for the sins of greedy, capitalistic America....
The Making of a Christian Aristocracy, by Michele Renee Salzman
This fascinating and important book attempts to explain why the fourth-century Roman senatorial aristocracy turned "from paganism to Christianity." Michele Renee Salzman, a professor of history at ...
Romancing the text
The complicated novel Possession by A. S. Byatt is a double-tiered romance and a literary brainteaser....
Wasteland, Texas
Thoreau's line about "the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation" could be applied to Justine Last, the lead character in The Good Girl, a low-budget morality play by writer Mike W...
First pitch: A pastor's Opening Day
When my children were younger, they used to call the first Sunday after Labor Day weekend “Opening Day.” They were referring, not to that long-awaited day in early April when the first major league...