Latest Articles
Episcopalians and Race, by Gardiner H. Shattuck Jr.
Seven years in the writing, this is a significant and comprehensive history of African Americans and their quest for recognition in the Episcopal Church....
Preaching etc.
Forty years ago this month, I took a job as a student pastor in a small nondenominational church in a blue-collar community south of Chicago....
Prayer wise: More pigskin piety
Christian football fans in Texas and elsewhere are getting back at the Supreme Court....
Tapering off: A life with words
The child is sitting up in bed, propped against pillows. She is six years old. Her homebound teacher, Mrs. Williams, is due any minute. She is fond of Mrs....
A matter of taste? Religious meanings and musical styles: Religious meanings and musical styles
The cover of the August 1996 Atlantic Monthly announced a Christian cultural revolution: “Giant ‘full-service’ churches are winning millions of ‘customers’ with [their] pop-culture packaging...
Testing Christian taste: Twelve guidelines
1. There are many kinds of good taste, and many kinds of good religious art and music. In view of cultural diversity, it would be extremely odd if that were not true....
Probing the depths
My journey to the Montreal World Film Festival has become an annual spiritual retreat. Here citizens stand in long lines to pick up tickets to a sold-out Chinese film at 10:00 a.m....
Baptismal terrors
"Admiral, the great navy of the State of Nebraska,” my 1991 citation from Governor Ben Nelson of Nebraska declares....
Dubya-ism: The logic of "compassionate conservatism"
Compassionate Conservatism: What It Is, What It Does, and How It Can Transform America, by Marvin Olasky...
Remembering who we are: Sunday, October 8 (Psalm 8)
"We have forgotten who we are....
The millstone (Mark 9:38-50)
Eternal punishment. Like it or not, it is a biblical concept, albeit a late-blooming one....
Stain of sanctimony
The Human Stain, by Philip RothThe Day After: A Retrospective on Religious Dissent in the Presidential Crisis, by Gabriel J. Fackre...
Faith Beyond Reason, by C. Stephen Evans
The mall food court tables are close together. You can't help but overhear the two teens at the next table....
Observing Lieberman: Religious practice in public
A few days before the 1988 election that sent him to the U.S. Senate from Connecticut, Joseph Lieberman heard an encouraging story from one of his friends....
Aguacate revisited: Tracing two missing Americans
Aguacate, the Honduran base built by the Reagan administration for the Nicaraguan contras in the early 1980s, faded from the limelight in 1988 when the contras and Sandinistas signed a cease-fire a...
Community radio: Democratizing the airwaves
Since Congress and the Federal Communication Commission deregulated broadcasting in the early 1980s, control of radio and TV stations has moved steadily into a handful of multinational corporations...
Seeking justice in Rwanda
Number of wars in Europe in the past ten years: 4Number of wars in Africa in the past ten years: 15...
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....