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At the pastors’ conference, a church diagnostician has been telling me and other glassy-eyed pastors that we have to start seeing things differently....

Eleven-year-old Jennifer has invited her friend Claire to spend the day. Jennifer’s younger sister, Laurie, who is eight, is trying to keep up with the older girls....

Few bytes of humor have logged more miles on the Internet than certain bloopers and gaffes collected by Richard Lederer (in Anguished English and More Anguished English), and thos...

What kind of relationship do you want to have with your teen in five years?” Tim Tahtinen, youth leader at the United Methodist Church of Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, likes to pose that question...

By a coincidence that must strike a chord in the hearts of all who long for Christian unity, Easter Sunday falls on the same day this year for Christians of both East and West....

I should be attending a conference in New York, but I am at home staring at my computer, with an entire week of travel wiped out because of a pesky bronchial infection....

With the beginning of the kamikaze missions we call denominational conventions only a month or two off, it is proper and wise to prepare ourselves for what will happen at most of them....

For much of this century, the waning influence of religion in American colleges and universities was viewed as a natural concomitant of modernization, and it was generally seen as a necessary or ev...

Around 1967, a visitor came to worship at the church that my family attended. He was a minister on leave from his parish while he worked for Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty....

Home and Exile by Chinua Achebe ...

Max Weber's early 20th-century sociological analysis of the ideal types of religious leadership is still a useful benchmark for discussions of founders of religious traditions....

Brenda Brasher believes that each generation must articulate ideas of the divine that make sense against the backdrop of its own time....

Harvey Cox chose the title of a revival hymn for the title of his memoir, Just As I Am....

The accidental tourist traveling through the Adams-Morgan district in Washington enters a fascinating, complex neighborhood....

How do you learn to think about the long-range implications of issues in a culture that is fixated on the short term?...

The changing profile of seminary students has been much remarked upon....

The number of ordained clergy age 35 or under in mainline denominations is remarkably low....

In Why Religion Matters, Huston Smith argues for the importance of having and articulating a worldview....

To sustain a weekly column over a 40-year period requires paying attention—and getting more than a little help from others....

Mainline denominations have only begun to recognize the alarmingly low numbers of clergy under the age of 35....