Latest Articles
Our man Jesus
The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man.By Walter Wink. Fortress,356 pp., $26.00....
Abe’s eloquence
Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural.By Ronald C. White Jr. Simon & Schuster, 203 pp., $24.00....
What would Jesus count? A faithfulness index: A faithfulness index
At a church staff devotional the other day, a colleague read the passage from the 25th chapter of Matthew about the separating of the sheep and the goats, and about how we minister to Jesus Christ ...
An expanded table: Christian Churches Together in the U.S.A.
The ecumenical tables in the U.S. are too small. None is large enough to encompass the full diversity of Christian life in this country....
Speaking up for Israel: Revisionists need revising
Some 25 years ago I met with three major spokesmen of the Palestine Liberation Organization in my capacity as chair of Breira, a Jewish group supporting a two-state solution for Israel/Palestine....
Who’s counting? Doing the numbers on membership: Doing the numbers on membership
Journalists covering religion regularly cite membership figures for the various religious organizations....
The infidels are us: Anatomy of a fundamentalist cause
In the wake of the terrorist fury unleashed by Osama bin Laden and his Islamic al-Qaeda organization on September 11, Western analysts have been scrambling to analyze the competing ideologies that ...
In defense of celibacy: An act of total self-giving
Every day the newspaper brings fresh evidence of the crisis in the Catholic Church, a crisis with implications far-reaching enough to be of concern to all Christians....
Fasten your seatbelts: A space chaplaincy
The American Association for the Advancement of Science sounds like a feet-on-the-ground organization. But in a recent meeting in Boston some scientists took flight, at least in imagination....
Wages of reform: Welfare policy: A six-year report
Six years after Bill Clinton signed into law a controversial bill ending “welfare as we know it,” Congress is debating how to extend or revise the welfare program....
Macro-mystery: Matthew 28:16-20
Compared to cosmologists, theologians have the advantage—and disadvantage—of revelation.
Repeat offenders: Romans 1:16-17, 3:22b-28; Matthew 7:21-29
Justification by grace through faith has been a perennial theme throughout the history of the people of God. St....
State of siege: Conflict at the Church of the Nativity
As anyone following the news knows, Palestinians and Israelis offer two entirely different accounts of the violence (and two different accounts of what has happened in the region since the emergenc...
After the assault: Report from the Jenin Camp
Jenin—the name comes from the Arabic and Hebrew words for “garden.” As Moses was leading his people across the Jordanian desert, no doubt they dreamed of a place like this—g...
Coming of age
The lyrical road comedy Y Tu Mamá También ("And Your Mother Too") suggests what one of those fraudulent the-summer-I-became-a-man movies might be like if it were made by some...
Believing in economics
Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond.By Robert H. Nelson. Pennsylvania State University Press, 378 pp., $35.00....
Venice, by Garry Wills
To understand a deeply religious culture, one must study how its theological assumptions are at play in all its aspects--its art, music literature, politics and economics--to say nothing of its sel...
How Democratic Is the American Constitution? by Robert A. Dahl
We need to "change . . . the way we think about" the American Constitution, says Robert Dahl....
Aging Well, by George E. Vaillant
Reading this book will not grant us an escape from eventual death or the inevitable losses of old age. But it can help us to learn from those who have aged well....