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America is living stormy Monday while the pulpit is preaching happy Sunday. Can we recover a blues sensibility?

In Chattanooga, I walk with steady steps over a pedestrian bridge that stretches over the Tennessee River, listening to the soft souls of my shoes keeping a rhythm against the worn wood....

Earlier this week I e-mailed my parents an article from NPR that caught my attention: "It's Never Too Soon To Plan Your 'Driving Retirement.'" Using the story of a 94-year-old woman who decided to give up driving on her 90th birthday, the article explores this one particular challenge of getting older. In sending it to my parents (who are in their mid-sixties), I was mostly joking. Still, though, there's a little bit of interest—though not at all concern yet—behind my sharing that article with them. All things come to an end.

Kulakov’s poems find the holy in the unsettling yoke of disparates: in the Bible and Qur’an lying side by side; in a mango glowing from within an aluminum can; in Harlem, where “flowers of blood na...

I just got back from Disney World with my kids. The trip set me thinking about how stories get told and passed on.

Perhaps normal people no longer assume that church is part of what it means to be normal. Or perhaps the idea of a normal center was flawed all along.

Sometimes I think there should be another word for "stewardship." It's always been the word we use to describe the annual emphasis (usually in the fall) on giving financially, usually to your local...

Two hundred years ago this fall, the first American missionaries opened the doors of their first school in India and the work of the American foreign mission movement officially began....

Mark Taylor's cultural history of speed starts at the Reformation and examines the interwoven threads of religion, society, politics, art, and economics.

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

(The Christian Science Monitor) On the outside, the house is fortified with sandbags and machine guns....

Residents of Hamtramck, Michigan, have elected a Muslim majority to their city council, symbolizing the demographic changes that have transformed the city once known for being a Polish-Catholic enc...

Why, asks Dalil Boubakeur, should hundreds of empty churches not be converted to mosques? It's an intriguing question.

The callousness of Pontius Pilate was legendary: if you could choose your judge, you did not want him. Jesus cannot choose.

It’s all over my Facebook newsfeed: some retail stores are bucking the trend and staying closed for Thanksgiving Day, and people—Christians and atheists, conservatives and liberals—are applauding them for it.

We want to raise social justice warriors—kids who champion equality and care for the vulnerable, and who subvert the power systems in our world by embodying the prophetic ways of Jesus. We want to activate their imagination, and to hope they'll do better than we did. Whether we admit it or not, we want our children to reflect the values close to our hearts. I know it’s tricky business imposing our own dreams on little autonomous human beings, but if I’m honest, I want my deepest convictions to become theirs. I want to partner with them in paving the ways of peace and righteousness.

President Obama is furious that legislators lack the will to address gun violence. But there are steps he could take without them.

Matt talks to the McCormick Theological Seminary professor about liberationist preaching, being a missionary in the U.S., and prophetic preaching vs. moralistic finger-wagging.

The two preachers at my house have a disagreement in principle about church attendance. Oh, we’re both for it under ordinary circumstances! We grew up in families where everybody went to church. We loved Sunday school and youth group and special choirs. Really, seriously, most of the time we are eager to get up and go on a Sunday morning, to lead worship in our respective congregations. But on vacation?

Some have dismissed the culture wars as a sideshow. Andrew Hartman insists that the issues at stake in cultural politics are real.