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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.

Here's to all the people who give their last coin.

We are bargain hunters, all of us. We make bargains with God, with reality or the cosmos or karma or whatever. We are convinced someone or something out there is keeping score, and that our lives are like a bet we are daily making that the things we do are somehow a reliable indicator of the things we will get.

I hosted UNCO again this year, and it’s been interesting to see what’s going on in the innovative church world....

In this webinar Greg Boyd will discuss with Drew G.I. Hart how the Neo-Anabaptist movement in North America can engage "Anablactivism" and vice-versa. Drew's research, focused on the intersection of Black theology and Anabaptism, invites us to consider the potential of Anablacktivism for inspiring Christ's followers to faithful action today.

(The Christian Science Monitor) Members of the Union for Reform Judaism, the largest movement of Judaism in the United States, passed ...

The people at Friendship Church make creative use of art. They have also learned to be creative as they form their community and shape their narratives.

For three weeks in October, Roman Catholic bishops held their most significant and contested gathering in the past 50 years....

The Christian conference circuit has special appeal to women. Jews and Muslims alike have dinners and parties organized around their holiday calendar....

I grew up around art and a few artists. I looked to people who had a reverence for the world at large. A natural contemplative awareness developed, as in many children before it is covered over. Call it awe, which Abraham Heschel describes as an “intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme.” No wonder I became both a photographer and an Episcopal deacon.

What do I believe? I oftentimes forget what I believe, until I stop to ask. People may assume I have my beliefs all figured out, given my profession as clergy.

Padraig O'Malley is not the first scholar to call the two-state approach a failed paradigm. Yet where others suggest an alternative, O'Malley remains in the deconstructing stage.

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

c. 2015 Religion News Service (RNS) They can be found on the battlefield, at a chicken-processing plant, and behind the locked gates of a prison....

c. 2015 Religion News Service (RNS) What should the U.S. military have to do to provide religious accommodations for locked-up al-Qaida terrorism suspects?...

(The Christian Science Monitor) When militants from the self-described Islamic State began attacking the Assyrian Christian village of...

"Buddhism has not just provided the flashlight with which I have discovered what was in the Christian basement. It has also added to that basement."

Recently the online world has been filled with images of people in desperate conditions, images not from Pakistan or Syria but from the Greek islands closest to Turkey: Chios, Lesbos, Leros. One picture showed a migrant raft landing near sunbathing tourists on Kos, an island I once knew well. It was a way station on my yearly visits to the nearby island of Patmos, where St. John was once a refugee himself. I went there to visit another immigrant to Greece: a spiritual poet named Robert Lax, who was Thomas Merton’s best friend.

There’s a popular misconception when it comes to advice we give and crave during difficult times:“You’ll get through this. You can do it!” “If I can survive this. . . . I can do anything.” In life’s hard places, we rally ourselves around images of strength and courage.

Cottrell tells the Christmas story in reverse, starting with Anna and going back to the hopes of Isaiah and Moses. Each episode is imaginatively told....