Latest Articles
God After Auschwitz, by Zachary Braiterman
Zachary Braiterman challenges a well-subscribed theory about the delay in the expression of post-Holocaust thought and the onset of dialogue....
Going negative: The Religious Right flexes its muscles
Just a few years ago the Religious Right was talking about making itself more appealing and effective in mainstream politics....
Progress and 'relapse' The Century and World War I: The Century and World War I
Before the outbreak of World War I, the Century, not unlike many other American journals, regularly expressed an idealistic and basically isolationist position when considering America’s r...
The day we bless the chainsaws: Faith at work
I imagine it like this. We put up signs all over the Northeast Kingdom, that region of Vermont in which my neighbors and I continue to enjoy the distinction of being outnumbered by Holstein cows....
Grace in the face of suicide: Theological questions and hopes
Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, by Kay Redfield Jamison....
Nullifiers and insurrectionists: America’s antigovernment tradition
A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government, by Garry Wills...
A bottomless pit
"The politics of death is a bottomless pit that sucks everybody in.” This judgment, offered by a California attorney who has tried more than 100 capital cases, aptly summarizes the complicated argu...
Inauthentic but valid
In Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong James W. Loewen tells us that he encountered a marker at the Little Bighorn River battlefield in Montana dedicated to U.S....
Holiness: Sacrifice (Mark 8:31-38)
If you have denied your “self,” the cross you take up isn’t exactly yours.
Debating homosexuality
Homosexuality and Christian Faith: Questions of Conscience for the Churches, edited by Walter Wink...
Doña Inés vs. Oblivion, by Ana Teresa Torres, translated by Gregory Rabassa
Winner of the 1998 Pegasus Prize for Literature, this novel is both a family saga and a fictionalized account of the history of Venezuela, focusing on the relentless conflict between races and clas...
The Eyes of the Heart, by Frederick Buechner
Few people listen to their lives as closely as Frederick Buechner does, and fewer can articulate so well what they hear....
Haiti in extremis: Disillusioned with democracy
When the last remnants of Operation Uphold Democracy—a UN peacekeeping force but predominantly American for much of its duration—left Haiti a few weeks ago, some observers voiced dire predictions o...
What’s going on? Faith at work: faith at work
Perhaps because I’m the very part-time priest of a very small parish, it has taken me a long time to learn the proper answer to the question, “What’s going on at your church these days?”...
Ecumenical quandary
Recently Yale Divinity School organized a conference to mark a major ecumenical event of the last decade (some would even argue, the major ecumenical event of the last century)....
Koinonia’s search for community: Can its vision be restored?
Under a quartz-blue sky last October, a procession made its way from Habitat for Humanity’s international headquarters in Americus, Georgia, to a modern gray one-story building a few blocks away....
Holiness: Baptism: Mark 1: 9-15
Lent is about preparation. Forty days: time for catechumens to prepare for baptism. Time to be ready for what is to come at the Easter vigil....
Cross and swastika
Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust, edited by Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel...