Latest Articles
Candid reporting
If you want to correctly interpret the news, stop assuming that the mainstream media know it all; pay attention instead to voices speaking quietly over in the corner....
Stay of execution: A moratorium on the death penalty
It took Richard Nixon, a fervent anticommunist, to begin a new era of relations with communist China, and perhaps it takes a Republican supporter of capital punishment to launch a new era of opposi...
A Christian appeal to Islam: A Coptic leader invokes the Qur’an
After years of enduring harassment and violence, Egypt’s Christians, the Copts, have seen their situation improve in recent months....
Foreign aid: Does it harm or help? Donors and clients in the developing world
Aid to Africa: So Much to Do, So Little Done, by Carol LancasterFuture Positive: International Co-operation in the 21st Century, by Michael Edwards...
At home in the spiritual marketplace: Five types of religious questers
Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion, by Wade Clark Roof...
Pope Pius XII and the Nazis: Shrewd diplomat or failed prophet?
Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, by John CornwallPius XII and the Second World War: According to the Archives of the Vatican, by Pierre Blet...
Power loss
I have just spent the last hour turning on and off light switches, standing in front of heater vents, and opening faucets....
Already avant-garde
The church regularly gets criticized for being behind the times. Let the culture come up with something and, in time, churches follow, critics say....
Holiness: Simplicity: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
The religion of Israel is a great theater. Moses goes up on the mountain and the clouds close underneath him like curtains....
Body politics
Starving for Salvation: The Spiritual Dimensions of Eating Problems Among American Girls and Women, by Michelle Mary Lelwica...
Gertrude and Claudius, by John Updike
John Updike's 19th novel, plotted as a "prequel" to Shakespeare's Hamlet, is a beautifully crafted, captivating story....
God squad: Testifying at the Super Bowl
After St. Louis Rams receiver Isaac Bruce made the game-winning touchdown against the Tennessee Titans in the Super Bowl, he gave credit to God. “It was all God....
What can Christians give? Pertinent visions
In this new century, any credible answer to that question needs to be prefaced by what we cannot give....
Lost in the digital cosmos: Trying to ask the right questions
Writer Jon Katz recently said that news coverage of the Internet lurches “from one extreme to the other.” Either the Net is “a dread menace or it’s a Utopian vision.” Journalism, he concluded, “has...
Diabolical sentimentality
Ever since I was a child, my mother has observed the season of Christmas in the same way....
Cosmic shifts
If you were around any of the years in this chronology you probably didn’t notice—I didn’t—the instant effect of the following:
1944—first automatic, general purpose digital computer;...
Wine tasting: 2 Corinthians 3:1-6; Mark 2:13-22
As the gusty winds of change blow unpredictably through the church, Jesus provides an intriguing sound bite in the Gospel lesson: “One puts new wine into fresh wineskins.” Fresh wineskins, as faith...
Desire of the Everlasting Hills, by Thomas Cahill
Thomas Cahill's title comes from Genesis 49:26. Though it is hard to see any reference to Jesus in that passage, it does come close to defining this book's tone....
Where they belong
The four front-runners for the presidency are following what has become a political pattern: candor when there are no votes to be lost, extreme caution when votes are at risk....