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There are some advantages to teaching online. Often instructors complain that the online format robs them of give-and-take moments with students. But given the current size of many history survey sections—50, 90, 300, even 500 people—how realistic is it to expect those real-time opportunities for conversation? Online threaded discussions are often more substantive, inclusive, and productive than the traditional classroom format.

I’m reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me right now. It’s a dissonant experience because the language in the book is exquisite, and the truth of it is tough and hard. I’m also reading Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, about the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C., in the early 20th century.

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

(The Christian Science Monitor) White-on-black Islamic calligraphy still adorns the establishment that the self-described Islamic Stat...

In our Gospel text, some of Jesus’ disciples find his teaching hard. Eating his body? Drinking his blood? I didn’t sign up for this. Couldn’t I just pray for you?

Sacramentality is the breath of Christian life—life that springs from the sacraments and life that yearns to return to them.

So, I realize I’m using the Royal "We" here. Obviously, some people like Donald Trump, because he’s polling quite well....

My article in the current issue examines an ongoing challenge for death-penalty opponents: abolishing ...

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

c. 2015 Religion News Service TORONTO (RNS) An ordained minister of Canada’s largest Protestant denomination is facing dismissal because she is an atheist....

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

At my last congregation, I often preached at a small Saturday evening service in our chapel. I came to call it, affectionately, the "early edition." One of the occasional attendees was a nice older woman who I came to know pretty well. Sometimes she came early and we had an opportunity to visit. Did I mention she is very nice?

If Congress kills the Iran deal, it will leave Obama unable to fulfill his duties as head of state. Yet legislators won't be the ones remembered for the failure.

Karl Giberson offers a cultural history of the Bible's first human. It's an intriguing and unsettling story.

"Why go to the city?" asked one of Bec Cranford-Smith's seminary professors. "There are enough new churches there."

In my Bible, this week's reading from Ephesians bears the title, "Rules for the New Life." The text reads like a laundry list of more or less unrelated instructions. Put away falsehood. Speak the truth, be angry but don't sin, and do not make room for the devil. Give up stealing and work honestly. Speak only what is useful for building up; do not grieve the Holy Spirit. Put away bitterness, anger, slander, and malice.

Every week or so, I google and #hashtag-search my way through the collective consciousness of our species, looking for new writings/ findings/research into multiverse cosmology. Ever since writing my little tome on how this new theory of everything plays with my faith, I've kept up with where things are going on that front and where things are trending. It's good to keep track of all the pertinent datapoints, which I file away neatly on Facebook for future reference. There's a peculiar thread that runs through the more recent writing on the subject. It feels like, for lack of a better word, despair.

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

c. 2015 Religion News Service...