Latest Articles
Living Jesus, by Luke Timothy Johnson
Living Jesus: Learning the Heart of the Gospel.By Luke Timothy Johnson. Harper SanFrancisco, 210 pp. ...
This Our Exile, by James Martin, S.J.
This Our Exile: A Spiritual Journey with the Refugees of East Africa.By James Martin, S.J. Orbis, 205 pp....
Perennial question, honest answers
May Christians ever endorse or participate in war or any form of military action?...
Cocaine state: Seeking peace in Colombia
Like ancient gaul, Colombia can be said to be divided into three parts. After several decades of undeclared civil war, leftist guerrillas dominate much of the southern part of the country....
Among the refugees: Notes from Macedonia
On the broad track of rock and dirt that runs through Cegrane, the largest refugee camp in Macedonia, a woman labors to push a wheelchair carrying a young boy with cerebral palsy....
Economics for the Earth
The Earthist Challenge to Economism: A Theological Critique of the World Bank.By John B. Cobb Jr. St. Martin's, 192 pp. ...
From world war to cold war, liberalism to liberationism
Building a Protestant Left: Christianity and Crisis Magazine, 1941-1993....
A new partnership
Vice-President Al Gore chose a safe venue—a Salvation Army gathering in Atlanta—to start talking about religion....
The easy yoke: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
I'm not sure how long ago it was, that summer afternoon at our friends' house when a neighbor drove her car dramatically into the yard and got out to say, catching her breath with every few words, ...
Leaving the church
Since I left parish ministry almost two years ago, the oddest question I have been asked is, "What do you preach about now that you have left the church?" The people who ask tend to be deeply invol...
Immaculate deception
Knowledge of the finer points of theology is neither irrelevant nor a luxury. Lack of that knowledge can entail great risk and expense....
A terrible swift exile
Finding Hope in the Age of Melancholy.By David S. Awbrey. Little Brown, 255 pp....
Gun laws, gun culture
When Vice-President Al Gore cast the tie-breaking vote in the U.S....
Do you believe? The God question: The God question
It was posed at gunpoint to at least two of the victims in the Littleton, Colorado, school massacre. "Do you believe in God?" the killer asked. When a girl said yes, he shot her dead....
Physics and faith: The luminous web
Among the many compelling reasons for religious people to engage science is the human tendency to base our worldviews on the prevailing physics of the day....
The fine print of commitment: Psalm 69:8-11, 18-20Jeremiah 20:7-13Romans 6:1b-11Matthew 10:24-39
When i was baptized at the age of 11, I had no idea what the risks of believing in Jesus Christ would be....
Unknown places
When I came home from the hospital with a broken ankle, I was feeling fragile and sick from pain and the anesthetic I had been given....
Mysterious beginnings
What kind of book is Herman Melville's Moby Dick? Is it a book about whaling? In some ways it is—full of empirical information on the subject. Is it a novel about the perennial mystery of evil and its impact on the human spirit? It is that too.
Rocks of Ages, by Stephen Jay Gould
We could avoid all sorts of nasty fights, Stephen Jay Gould argues, if we would stop expecting science to provide validating evidence for religious dogmas or biblical events. Nor ought we to turn to religion to resolve questions of a properly scientific nature. He wants no more natural theology, no more "anthropic principle," no more attempts to find scientific confirmation for religious beliefs, and no more fundamentalist "creation science." In short, "science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven."