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"Ministry a satisfying vocation.” Headlines like this one appeared in newspapers, church periodicals and elsewhere this past spring, as Duke’s (Lilly-funded) Pulpit and Pew Project reported the ini...

Before the Israeli-Palestinian conflict plunges even further into its cycle of violence, we should pause to examine one day in July when peace almost broke out....

Fifty-five years ago an eccentric and rather egocentric seminary professor called my roommate into his office and asked him to exchange eyeglasses....

An 11-year conflict between the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the Southern Baptist Convention reached the international stage in Spain....

The tone of Walter Wink’s review of my book The Bible and Homosexual Practice is a disheartening reminder of how mean-spirited...

Robert Gagnon’s treatment of my own work in his book The Bible and Homosexual Practice is anything but irenic....

Jesus knew forgiveness would always need special emphasis.

When a rabbi was asked, “Why is it that you rabbis put much of your teaching in the form of a question?” the rabbi replied, “So what’s wrong with a question?” The rabbi may be on to something....

Tucked away in an account of the Jewish resistance to Antiochus Epiphanes is the story of a hero’s sacrifice. The Book of 1 Maccabees describes the prebattle scene....

This bombshell of a book indicts the American academic Middle East studies establishment as guilty of minimizing and ignoring the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and of thereby failing to anticipate...

The Morebath whose voices are chronicled in Eamon Duffy's narrative is a remote and tiny sheep farming community in England's West Country....

If there were such a thing as an American moviemaker laureate, the title would go to writer-director John Sayles....

At the center of Lovely and Amazing is a dysfunctional family of mostly women....

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...

The U.S.’s stated plan to take out Iraqi president Saddam Hussein is deeply troubling....

Recently, I prayed for someone to die. She wasn’t an enemy. She was the beloved teenage daughter of two exceptionally fine church friends....

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...

When I visited a Baltimore neighborhood called Sandtown in 1997, my most vivid impression was that of disturbing, jarring contrast....

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....

How do the blessed feel when they think of the damned?