Latest Articles
Road trip: Luke 24:13-35
The storyteller weaves it all together—an unknown traveler named Cleopas and his companion; the resurrected Jesus, who is present but in an unrecognized, mysterious fashion; the travelers’ sudden r...
Dust to dust: The holiness of ashes
I am more at home with the ashes of Lent than with the perfect lilies of Easter.
Corporate citizen
Despite his book’s title, Lawrence Mitchell is not throwing bricks at corporate America....
God and goods
Stephen Long has written an engaging and frustrating book on the relation of theology and economics....
Make believe
I recently took my five-year-old son to see Return to Neverland, the sequel to the classic 1953 Disney animated film Peter Pan....
Resilient loves
In cinematic tradition, when far-flung families gather for a domestic celebration the air is pervaded with the sound of rattling skeletons....
Broken spirits
When we first see him, Hank Grotowski (Billy Bob Thornton) is a spiritually comatose corrections officer who seems to have inherited his bigotry, like his line of work, from his father, Buck (Peter...
Portraits of the poor
Surviving in a Material World. By Ronald Paul Hill. University of Notre Dame Press, 175 pp., $22.95....
A Whosoever Church, by Gary David Comstock
The title of Gary Comstock's book is based on John 3:16, one of the most frequently quoted New Testament passages: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever...
Iris Murdoch, by Peter J. Conradi
When Iris Murdoch died in 1999, Harold Bloom, custodian of the literary canon, proclaimed that there were no serious writers left in Britain....
Nourishing Faith Through Fiction, by John R. May
Faith is a meaning-seeking venture, says John May, and believers are those who sense the grace-full Mystery afoot in this world....
Savior at large: John 20:1-18
John begins the Easter story with the words, “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark . . .” This is always how our discovery of the risen Christ begins—in darkness....
Mysterious power: The privilege of the pastorate
I love Eugene Peterson’s remark that “if you are called to it, being a pastor is the best life there is” (see David Wood’s interview...
Dying young: Questions about suicide
About every two hours a young person in the U.S. between the ages of 15 and 24 dies of suicide. It wasn’t always this way....
Bodies in limbo: Crematory scandal
The scandal unfolding at the Tri-State Crematory in Noble, Georgia, has often been compared to events in a Stephen King novel, complete with decaying corpses and an upstanding citizen unmasked as a...
From the Godhra station: Hindu-Muslim conflicts
On February 27, an express train carrying more than 2,500 passengers and running four hours late drew up at the Godhra railway station on the Gujarat-Madhya Pradesh border in Central India....
Jesus with a cowlick: Christ's hidden childhood
When Andy turned six, an extraordinary thing happened....
Frontiers of food: Marmite, lutefisk, haggis
The Marmite centennial in Britain prompts me to develop a thesis: National or creedal groups tend to keep their boundaries strong by pretending to like foods that others find distasteful....
The show-me disciple (John 20:19-31)
Mary can’t experience the resurrected Jesus for the disciples, and the disciples can’t experience Jesus for Thomas.
“The best life”: Eugene Peterson on pastoral ministry
Eugene Peterson on pastoral ministry