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I recently had the honor of sitting down with a fourth-generation Mississippian who knows a thing or two about racial injustice because he’s spent his life fighting it: Duncan M. Gray Jr., bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi from 1974 to 1993.

Three years after the publication of Sabbath in the Suburbs, I continue to speak to groups about our family’s experience of taking a day each week for rest and play (which looks very different now than it did during the year-long experiment, but that’s another post). People who’ve read the book will notice that we didn’t spend the day doing “holy” activities.

"What does it feel like to be a problem?” For the first time in college, a line from a book rang in my head for days. W. E. B....

For 20 years I taught James Joyce’s Ulysses every year, but I don’t get to anymore—new university, new job description....

Longtime Hauerwas readers will not be surprised to hear that his new book is maddening—nor that some of the most maddening aspects are also the most rewarding.

(The Christian Science Monitor) As the so-called Islamic State attempts to gain attention and support in Yemen with deadly sectarian a...

(The Christian Science Monitor) The roads that wind north from Lagos, Nigeria, toward the headquarters of the Winners’ Chapel megachur...

The college is closing, and I'm the chaplain.

Are the rest of us so different from our brothers and sisters in Libya or in Charleston? Are they heroes with whom we can never identify?

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, turns 91 years old on Thursday. By any reckoning, he has led a remarkable life. Anyone who visits Plains, in southwest Georgia, and especially the Carter farmstead three miles down the road in Archery, cannot fail to be impressed by the simplicity of Carter’s background. 

God is a metaphor. Or so goes a particular line of thought, as it struggles to make the idea of God meaningful. 

As I was in the midst of teaching the ancient Roman Stoic Epictetus at Oakdale Prison, an inmate stood up and launched into an argument that Stoicism is a loser’s philosophy....

The Damnation of Theron Ware, by Harold Frederic (1896), is the fictional tale of a sheltered Methodist minister who is suddenly bombarded with new theories of biblical criticism, exposure...

Phil Jenkins's abundant evidence gives lie to the traditional assumption that all but the four canonical Gospels were effectively squelched in the fourth century.

Molly Phinney Baskette's book is not a robust example of the Christian practice of confession. But she does offer a glimpse into the life of a church that is thriving against the odds.

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

This academic year will be the last year J. R....

As a second-generation Korean American, it is hard to identify stories from my past that can serve as reservoirs of understanding for my life now. “In you our ancestors trusted,” I could proclaim from those stories, “and you delivered them.”

At its worst, Protestantism has long been deeply suspicious of all holy things, of the very notion that a physical object can carry anything of the sacred. At its best, such a suspicion is aimed instead at the notion of holier things—of an elite, rarefied sacrality that sets a few things utterly apart. So I’m not among those rolling my eyes at Rep. Bob Brady for seeing something holy in a glass of water.