Latest Articles
Faith, hope and ecology: A Christian environmentalism
The only possible dialog is the kind between people who remain what they are and speak their minds....
Oil dependents: Better to sacrifice oil than blood
The U.S.’s approach to the Middle East frequently seems less policy than fated inevitability. The U.S....
Churchgoers from elsewhere: Surveys: ‘UUism' unique
Before the American Unitarian Association merged with the Universalist Church of America in 1961, the former group ran an ad campaign suggesting, “I was a Unitarian all along and never knew i...
Homo ludens: "Poised between gaiety and gravity"
Prufrockian is a term that entered the vocabulary after the 1917 publication of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J....
Christ for the world: Isaiah 7:10-16; Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25
When I think of the Christmas story, I see the crèche that was displayed each year in the front hall of my family home....
God's absence in Advent
Every valley shall be exalted—but when?
No comment department
Star-crossed toys: Although reluctant to seize bank accounts of terrorist organizations, U.S....
Canon fire
Since the publication of his Biblical Theology in Crisis in 1970, Brevard Childs (recently retired from Yale Divinity School) has pursued ...
Prophetic mysticism
The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. By Dorothee Soelle. Fortress, 325 pp., $20...
Lives of the Saints, by Richard P. McBrien
There's somebody for everybody--an intention that cuts many ways--in this latest encyclopedic offering from eminent Notre Dame theologian and historian Richard P....
Reading religiously: The witness of a community of readers
The alarm has been sounded over the future of reading. We are rapidly becoming a culture of the image, not the word, we are told....
In a foreign place: Enemy love and realism
It’s a cliché to observe that since September 11 we are living in a different world, that everything seems different now. But it is true....
Wheat and chaff: Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12
John the Baptist’s fiery call to repentance sounds harsh when we’re in the midst of preparations for the baby Jesus. The birth of a child is usually preceded by joyful expectation....
A desert in bloom
Since I live near Lake Michigan, I take frequent walks along the lake and gaze out at the water, which stretches to the distant horizon....
Grace-full gestures: Opportunities for reconciliation
In his wonderful memoir Open Secrets, Richard Lischer describes a personal conflict that developed between Lischer and Leonard, a lay leader in the congregation....
Revenge or justice? Revenge won't work in Afghanistan: Revenge won't work in Afghanistan
It was much easier to oppose the gulf war. The situation that evoked the U.S. military response ten years ago was not personal, unless you count the loss of a plentiful oil supply as personal....
Getting religion: New connotations
As the Associated Press story had it, a Greyhound passenger lost it when the bus driver and several others on the bus asked him to douse his cigarette....
Thorn in the side
With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology. By Stanley Hauerwas. Brazos Press, 250 pp., $22.99....
Scary scenarios
GERMS: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War. By Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad. Simon & Shuster, 367 pp., $27.00....