Latest Articles
Pastoral learning at Bellevue Hospital: A seminarian's apprenticeship
At the end of my first year at General Theological Seminary, in New York City, I spent eight weeks in clinical pastoral education at Bellevue Hospital....
Geographies of memory
It just didn’t seem right, reflecting on my father’s life and death in the midst of a city where neither of us had spent much time....
Circumstantial evidence
Every half century or so the Christian Century moves its offices. As our old Dearborn Street neighborhood seems to be “going condo,” we moved to Michigan Avenue last autumn....
Counting diamonds: Mark 9:30-37
The Roman custom of lifting a newborn infant probably underlies Jesus’s symbolic action in Mark 9.
Uncommon sense: Sunday, September 17 (Mark 8:27-38)
Often Jesus’s words seem perversely contrary to sense....
The unanchored self
The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, by Pico Iyer ...
Inventing the "Great Awakening," by Frank Lambert
A lot of parties have put a lot of stake in the Great Awakening, the wave of religious enthusiasm which swept up and down the colonial seaboard in the early 1740s....
The Pacifist Option, by Alexander Webster
In the ecumenical conversation on war and peace, the voice of Orthodox Christianity has too often gone underrepresented....
Runaway Slaves, by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger
Until fairly recently, scholars have not known very much about the everyday lives of enslaved African Americans....
Authority figures: Resolving ecclesial issues
There’s an old bumper sticker with the words “Question authority.” To which the proper response, of course, is: “Says who?” As that reply suggests, suspicion of authority, however well advised, doe...
Oberammergau 2000: The passion revised
The Passion Play at Oberammergau is a vast spectacle that can be viewed at many levels....
Political maneuvers
Media, religion and politics have a way of smashing into one another in rich and sometimes perverse ways....
Diminished
Our hopes are a measure of our greatness. When they shrink, we ourselves are diminished....
Eruption of truth: An interview with Raimon Panikkar: On inter- and intrareligious dialogue
I was brought up in the Catholic religion by my Spanish mother, but I never stopped trying to be united with the tolerant and generous religion of my father and of my Hindu ancestors. This does not make me a cultural or religious “half-caste,” however. Christ was not half man and half God, but fully man and fully God. In the same way, I consider myself 100 percent Hindu and Indian, and 100 percent Catholic and Spanish. How is that possible? By living religion as an experience rather than as an ideology.
A cereal offense
General Mills recently tucked a CD-ROM containing the Bible into 12 million cereal boxes and then had to issue profuse apologies for having done so as it withdrew the offensive inclusions....
Matters of the heart: Sunday, September 3 Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
"There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile a person.” Or as Eugene Peterson translates it, “It’s not what you swallow that pollutes your life.” I’m tempted to disagree....
When the gospel goes to the dogs (Mark 7:24-30)
If we are to get past our discomfort with the name-calling, we will have to look more closely and note what Jesus does with the word dog.
From reformer to revolutionary
I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King Jr., by Michael Eric Dyson...
Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee
In this novel, perhaps his masterpiece, J. M. Coetzee emerges as the most old-fashioned kind of literary genius: a person whose strong imagination is guided by firm and deeply held beliefs....