Latest Articles
Ecumenically challenged: Expanding the table
Leaders of the National Council of Churches have at various times over the past decade floated the idea of seeking a new, more inclusive kind of ecumenical organization....
Dollars and signs: NCC revisits the vision thing
One figure concentrates the attention of Robert Edgar, chief executive of the National Council of Churches: $650,000....
Conversations with Camus: A minister and a seeker
One day toward the end of my summer in Paris, the concierge’s wife prepared supper for Camus and me. We had planned to take a ride that afternoon, but after we finished our meal, we could not bring ourselves to leave. We chose instead to sit and enjoy the view of the river. We were both relaxed and enjoying the weather when Camus broke the silence: “Howard, do you perform baptisms?”
Public religion, through thick and thin: Religion and the "shared life"
Politics, Religion, and the Common Good : Advancing a Distinctly American Conversation About Religion in Our Shared Life, by Martin E. Marty with Jonathan Moore...
Taking the bad with the good: Violence and the sacred
The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation, by R. Scott Appleby...
Slowing down for death
Although I live nine miles away from town, there is nothing much to slow me down on my way in....
Unconscious pleasures
Judging by the typos in a recent sample of church bulletins, the pleasures of the senses haunt the unconscious minds of many Christians. Food is, of course, high on the list....
Weatherproof: Job 38:1-11; Mark 4:35-41
In considering Mark’s story of Jesus’s stilling the storm and rebuking the wind, the Book of Job is helpful....
The polar bear’s perspective
Family members gather in a Liverpool hotel ballroom to learn the fate of loved ones who were traveling on the Titanic. Everyone is frantically seeking information on survivors....
Ecclesial protest: Acts of disobedience
Getting arrested, as advocates for gays and lesbians did at the United Methodist General Conference in Cleveland this month, has become a banal form of protest....
Watershed in Cleveland: At the UMC General Conference
Seizing the blessings of a rising stock market and unexpectedly plentiful reserve funds, the United Methodist General Conference approved millions of dollars for innovative programs serving oversea...
Windblown: Acts 2:1-11
It was a great day for multiculturalism. It was the Tower of Babel turned upside-down, and what fell out was a glorious manifestation of the grace of God....
Set free
Perpetua, Macrina, Theodora, Sara, Syncletica, Melania the Younger and Melania the Elder, Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Ávila—I didn’t hear about any of these great women of fa...
Hugging the middle
John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace, edited by James Yerkes...