Latest Articles
Counting the votes
The extraordinary presidential election ended not with a bang but with a legal whimper from the U.S. Supreme Court. The 5-4 decision in Al Gore v....
The pearly gates of cyberspace: Escaping from the body
Science writer Margaret Wertheim suggests in The Pearly Gates of CyberSpace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet that cyberspace has become for some a technological subs...
The stories of 2000
When Vice President Al Gore picked Joseph Lieberman as his running mate, it was the first-ever selection for a national ticket of a Jewish nominee—and a practicing Orthodox Jew at that....
Feminist gains: The Century and women
In the late 1980s, Barbara Brown Zikmund lamented the failure of churches prior to the 1960s to understand and help working women, women who had first moved into the workplace during World War II....
Christmas presence
There will be no Christmas celebration in Bethlehem’s Manger Square this year....
Focus on Bush
Sunday morning comic sections occasionally include one of those confusing hidden pictures which can abruptly assume a different shape depending on how you focus on the images....
Somebody's calling my name: Sunday, January 7 Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3:15-22
Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Memorial, was explaining to a TV interviewer why her remarkable work has come to have such a strong grip upon the emotions of the American people....
Sunday, January 14 (John 2:1-11)
At every wedding we wait for the moment when we witness a bride and groom vow faithfulness to each other “‘til death us do part.” We think when we hear those words, or even more when we speak them ...
Somebody's calling my name: Sunday, January 7 Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3:15-22
Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Memorial, was explaining to a TV interviewer why her remarkable work has come to have such a strong grip upon the emotions of the American people....
Sunday, January 14 (John 2:1-11)
At every wedding we wait for the moment when we witness a bride and groom vow faithfulness to each other “‘til death us do part.” We think when we hear those words, or even more when we speak them ...
Pondering Luther
Martin Luther's Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development, by Bernhard Lohse...
The Book of Concord, edited by Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert
The confessional writings in the Book of Concord, first published in 1580, are given authoritative status by Lutherans because they are viewed as faithful expositions of scripture, particu...
Talking about marriage
Churches can and should affirm the moral significance of marriage without denigrating those who are not married....
Ecumenical wobbling: The NCC reversal on marriage
When Robert Edgar of the National Council of Churches suddenly told the NCC’s General Assembly that he was removing his name from an evangelical-mainline-Catholic statement on marriage, it ap...
In God's ecology: A revisionist theology of nature
In his book Earth in Balance, Al Gore asks, “Why does it feel faintly heretical to a Christian to suppose that God is in us as human beings?...
Natural resistance: Faith at work
There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade for learned as well as unlearned hands,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, echoing a theme that goes back at least as far as the Rule of St. Benedict....
A politician for all seasons
When it became clear that we did not yet have a president-elect, I determined not to waste time glued to the television set trying to follow the meandering route that will eventually give us our ne...
Embrace the new
The Marty male line since 1792 goes like this: Rudolph begat Bendicht begat Gottfried begat Emil begat Martin begat Joel begat Noah begat Muhammed....
The Palestinians' missing map
When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat new borders for a future Palestinian state, he couldn’t show them on a map. There is no such map....