Latest Articles

My wife and I are in Maine for a memorial service celebrating the life of the grandfather of my children, my beloved father-in-law from the first go-around. The collection of his children and grandchildren, and his wife’s clan of three generations, includes a handful of other LGBTQ people. It’s been a wonderful experience, living into the way we’ve all worked so hard to make our two household-family work for 20 years now.

There are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. The administration has to somehow prioritize who is slated for deportation.

Growing up it was in the kitchen every Sunday where I would witness the most frenetic, clamorous work of our church community.

Max Porter’s debut novel, which hovers between poetry and prose, illustrates the ways in which grief can be simultaneously violent and gentle.

A few weeks after a young white gunman killed nine people at a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episco­pal Church in Charleston, another young white man walked into a Bible study at another...

Jackson Nasoore Ole Sapit, a tra­ditionalist Anglican bishop who nonetheless steered clear of sexuality issues, has been elected the new archbishop of Kenya and is being installed on July 3....

A fast-growing number of people do not have a religious first language. And many churches don't seem eager to connect with them.

A few years ago, I was asked how long I had been a pastor. I forget how long it was precisely, but it must have been somewhere in the window of two to three years. I told my questioner this and the response was darkly humorous: “Oh, so long enough to disappoint some people.” Indeed. I was having a conversation with a friend recently about the broad strokes of our city’s response to the Syrian refugee crisis.

The satisfaction theory of the atonement centers on debt, humanity’s debt to God. It’s often criticized for its gruesome picture of God. But it also paints a weird picture of Jesus: Christ the Debt Buyer.

To lionize the missionary’s courage, Muslims were cast as implacable adversaries and served as the quintessential foil.

The Washington National Cathe­dral will replace depictions of the Confederate flag in its stained-glass windows with plain glass but maintain adjoining panes honoring Con­federate generals for at l...

Conservative religious people decry what they see as a liberal media unsympathetic to their worldview. Liberal Protestants and Catholics wonder why the media deploys the umbrella term “Christians” but seems to mean mostly people who sound nothing like them. People of other faiths may wonder why they rarely appear in the news except to represent extremism of some form. It seems as if the media aids rather than ameliorates the growing polarization of the American populace. Eighty-nine years ago an interfaith group of activists and religious and political leaders aimed to use the nascent radio and movie industries to bring people of different faiths, races, and ethnicities together. 

We sat on the T, hot and tired after a morning wandering the streets of Cambridge and the ivy-Hogwarts glory of Hahvahd's campus. It was the final day of an all-too-short vacation. It being public transportation, the public was present, a sampling of the Boston streetscape.

The apocalypse, it seems, is cultural and psychological rather than historical. One can only hope that this theory is right.

Somewhere in California on June 9, a terminally ill person may have lifted a glass and consumed a lethal slurry of pulverized prescription pills dissolved in water....

Jesus setting his face to Jerusalem marks a shift: the text mentions it three times. There is a boldness and immovable attention to the assignment.

Like Dmitri Karamazov, Robert Mapplethorpe knows that the beautiful is a battleground—and he's happy to play on the devil's side.

In this time of our church history, when going to a service is no longer a societal expectation and people don’t necessarily make business connections in the pews, preaching has become more importa...

Plato, it is said, confronted Diogenes as the great Cynic philosopher washed his greens for dinner. “If you had humored Dionysius”—the tyrant of Syracuse who had called Plato as an adviser—”you wouldn’t be rinsing greens now.” Diogenes answered him, “And if you rinsed greens, you wouldn’t have been a slave to Dionysius.”

Life in limbo for an immigrant teen