Latest Articles
Gospel ventures: Learning from new forms of church
Mainline to the Future: Congregations for the 21st Century, by Jackson W. Carroll ...
Why bother to think?
One of the central characters in Berke Breathed’s wonderful comic strip Bloom County was a penguin named Opus....
Renewed life: Seven ways to change congregational culture
Though the past quarter century has been a challenging, sometimes discouraging time for mainline congregations and their leaders, many positive things, often hidden from public view or statistical ...
Bible mania
What motivates people to buy nine or more Bibles? A good question, asked by Kimberly Winston in Publishers Weekly (October 9)....
In praise of the first coming: Sunday, November 19 Mark 13:1-8
Whenever the text turns apocalyptic, as it does this week, there would seem to be only two choices: either take it literally and join the lucrative doomsday machine of late-night, splendidly coifed...
Searching for patterns
How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, by Michael Shermer...
Generation to generation: What's up with the kids?
Since Ernest Hemingway famously quoted Gertrude Stein in the 1920s, “You are a lost generation,” Americans have been fascinated by the idea of generational difference....
Jews vs. Jews: Dissenting on IsraelI policy
The violence between Israelis and Palestinians is once again in the forefront of the news....
Gen X revisited: A return to tradition?
A statistic: only about 30 percent of people born between 1964 and 1978— that is, 30 percent of so-called Gen Xers—belong to a church....
Worship by generations
Willow Creek Community Church, originator of the famous “seeker service” model of outreach, has been fabulously successful at wooing members of the baby-boom generation....
Loneliness virus: Douglas Coupland's world
All the lonely people, where do they all come from? That question from “Eleanor Rigby” might serve as the epigraph for the works of Douglas Coupland....
Days of protest: The Century and the war in Vietnam
Part of the fabric of public life in America during the post–World War II years, perhaps the cross-stitch that held the symbolic boundaries in place, was anticommunism....
My pattern of crime
Do you remember how zealous you were about reaching “perfect attendance” marks in grade school? How careful you were about avoiding the first “absent” day?...
Why sin is God's business
A Presbyterian minister told me a story about his first year at a certain congregation....
Palestinians in the pressure cooker
Middle East summits come and go with one repeated mantra: bring an end to the violence....
Sunday, November 26, 2000 (Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14; Revelation 1:4b-8; Psalm 93; John 18:33-37
Go to Harvard Square in Cambridge or Washington Square in New York City or any public place where chess players have gathered to watch or challenge each other....
Neurotheology?
The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience, by Eugene D'Aquili and Andrew B. Newberg...
Way Out There in the Blue, by Frances Fitzgerald
Readers of this book must keep reminding themselves that, despite the fantasies it describes, it is not science fiction....
Clear callings
The reflection on vocation in this issue by Gilbert Meilaender takes us from Vergil’s epic, the Aeneid, to the Reformation era to the 20th century, with many stops in between....
Overinformed: Confessions of an information junkie
In Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut (1997) David Shenk tells of “technostress” researcher Philip Nicholson’s practice of asking his audiences, “Pretend that you were forced...