Latest Articles
Creative conflict
Congregations in Conflict: Cultural Models of Local Religious Life, by Penny Edgell Becker...
Risks of Faith, by James H. Cone and Black Faith and Public Talk, edited by Dwight N. Hopkins
Black theology as an intellectual discipline and as systematic discourse is virtually synonymous with the name and academic career of James H. Cone. Currently the Charles A....
The Changing Face of the Priesthood, by Donald B. Cozzens
In his apostolic letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente (1994), Pope John Paul II called upon Roman Catholics to prepare for the new millennium through an examination of conscience, an honest ...
Being Dead, by Jim Crace
On a beautiful Tuesday afternoon, Joseph and Celice, both middle-aged professors of zoology, revisit the remote beach that was the landscape of their courtship and first passion....
One Hundred Days, by David Biro
Being sick is more complicated than it used to be. Medical technologies that offer new hope also lead to a bewildering thicket of options....
Speaking Parables, by David Buttrick
Most books on the parables of Jesus seem to slice away at the biblical text....
Roman Catholicism in America, by Chester Gillis
Chester Gillis, the lead-off batter in the new Columbia Contemporary Religion series, has made a solid hit into left center field with this clear, engaging and reliable introduction to U.S....
Grace is wide enough: At the funeral of an atheist
We are gathered here in a Christian church as participants in a Christian memorial service to honor the life of Richard, a man who said that he did not believe in God. What right have we to do this? It would certainly be an affront to his memory were we, by this service, to deny him the right to have been the man he was. We cannot pretend or even suggest that he really was somehow, despite his insistence to the contrary, a Christian believer. Indeed, it would be a scandal if we who claim to honor Richard’s memory did not allow him, by his unbelief, to call into question our Christian belief.
In sacred groves: Paganism revives in Russia
In the forest shrine, the meat of two rams and a goat cook in great cauldrons suspended from wooden frames. Cloth belts stained with the blood of these sacrificial animals hang from the trees....
Indirect action: The Century and civil rights
During the early 1950s, the Century’s editors could hardly be classified as strategists in the war for civil rights, but they tried their hand at analysis and expressed sympathetic support...
Chain of hope
During the years of apartheid in South Africa, most of the Methodist Church’s involvement in education was halted by the government....
Imperial claims? The Vatican's catechism on the church: The Vatican reasserts its view of the church
The Protestant responses to the “Declaration on the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church” recently issued by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s Office for the Doctrine of the F...
Swallowing the pill
Many people expect mifepristone, or RU 486, the abortion-inducing drug just approved by the Federal Drug Administration (it will be marketed as Mifeprex), to usher in a new era in abortion history....
Branded by God: Sunday, October 29 (Jeremiah 31:31-34)
It's not like people in Jeremiah's day were asking God for a new covenant.
Possessed by hope
The Fabric of Hope: An Essay, by Glenn Tinder
The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope, by Andrew Delbanco...
The Catholic Imagination, by Andrew Greeley
Early in the 19th century Friedrich Schleiermacher remarked that Roman Catholics "are all immersed in the miraculous and may expect it at any moment." Without mentioning Schleiermacher explicitly, ...
Summer reading
Though neither of my parents had a college education, I learned from them the joy of reading....
Family divide: Who is my sister?
Compared to the usual formalities of ecumenical conversations, which include carefully worded assurances of mutual regard, the statement last month from the Vatican on the proper use of the term “s...