Latest Articles
Jesus as social visionary
By John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus. (HarperSanFrancisco, 653 pp.)...
Birthing
No birth was ever celebrated enough. The miracle and mystery of life is too much for us to take in....
Beauty and the beasts
Beauty is back" was a disturbing cover story in, of all places, the Chronicle of Higher Education (December 4)....
Makeshift communities: 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23
When two or more are gathered, factions lurk.
Congregations at the Crossroads, by Ronald E. Vallet
By Ronald E. Vallet, Congregations at the Crossroads: Remembering to Be Households of God. (Eerdmans, 256 pp.)...
Ministry and the Law, by Mary Angela Shaughnessy, and Stay Out of Court and Stay in Ministry, by Clarance Hagglund and Britton Weimer
By Mary Angela Shaughnessy, S.C.N., J.D., Ministry and the Law. (Paulist, 85 pp.)...
Mary Baker Eddy, by Gillian Gill
While factually rigorous, Gillian Gill's biography of Mary Baker Eddy is engaging and well paced....
Disproportionate punishment
Proportionality is the key theological word for the impeachment process, a word far superior to the solemn evocations of "the law" intoned by the ideologically driven conservatives on the Judiciary...
Bringing Pinochet to justice
Augusto Pinochet, retired army commander and former president-dictator of Chile, received an ironic and unwelcome birthday present this year while recuperating from back surgery in a London hospita...
A defeat, not a debacle: The religious right and the 1998 election
On the morning after the November elections, pundits announced the death of the Religious Right as a political force....
The World Council at 50: Seeking new terms of engagement
We intend to stay together." Delegates to the Eighth Assembly of the World Council of Churches reaffirmed that commitment in a ceremony on December 13 in Harare, Zimbabwe, repeating a declaration m...
On African soil
For its 50th-anniversary assembly, the World Council of Churches considered returning to Amsterdam, the site of its founding. But in the end the WCC decided to look to the future, not the past....
The Universal Declaration at 50: Changing the world?
December 10 marked the 50th anniversary of the United Nation's adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights....
Shaping character
A seminary student and I were walking around the lake on a beautiful evening. We had begun the walk in part for exercise, and in part because he wanted to talk about his vocation....
History of a hybrid
In about a year, after I finish directing the Public Religion Project, I plan to do some research on a way of writing about American religious history....
Rare sightings: Matthew 3:13-17
The water flows cleanly here, just a few miles from the source of the Hudson River, deep in the Adirondack Mountains....
On God and Dogs, by Stephen H. Webb
By Stephen H. Webb, On God and Dogs: A Christian Theology of Compassion. (Oxford University, 222 pp.)...
Living the incarnation
Some Christian theologians these days are involved in an important discussion about the limits of our knowledge and speech about God....