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U2's subway prank created a strange sort of intimacy and spontaneous community. I felt a similar dynamic at play at a recent funeral.

Sometimes it’s the child’s job to let go of old memories in order to make room for the new. Our task is to hold the old ones and to remind her that she was young once.

I grew up in a house in which hung a print of The Last Meeting of Lee and Jackson (engraved by Frederick Halpin, after Everett Julio), that classic emblem of the Lost Cause. This was common then in my neighborhood in Old Town Portsmouth, Virginia. My father, a Civil War buff who would tell me about the battles as we drove around Virginia, never indicated that the cause was just, but honored both men as soldiers, tacticians, human beings, Virginians. Yet in his political life he angered people, including his own political party, to the point of death threats, by his political stands against the institutionally-protected racism of "massive resistance." I’m not sure how to reconcile these things.

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

We need more than a national conversation about race and policing. We need spiritual and political change at the local level.

When eight pastors in Fountain Hills, Arizona, were planning a joint sermon series called “‘Progressive’ Christianity: Fact or Fiction?” they didn’t invite a local pastor who had cowritten a curric...

As long as people have been praying, they have also been asking for prayer from one another. In the Bible, the New Testament is full of requests from Paul and others to pray for them; contemporary places of worship often offer time in their services to pray for the specific needs of their parishioners. A new app called Instapray makes sense as a digital heir to that tradition.

I have burned one flag in my life. In college, some friends and I set a Confederate flag ablaze in a parking lot one summer afternoon. It was a symbolic way for us to renounce our racist heritage as young southern men. But renouncing it didn’t erase it.

Many people have an intuition that the natural world shows purpose, order, or providence. Benjamin Jantzen does a marvelous job analyzing the attempts to turn that intuition into arguments.

For African Americans, church violence has historic dimensions....

Imagine you're walking through a big city and you see a homeless person. You have several options.

There is a puzzling and disturbing detail in Mark’s account of the storm at sea, one we often do not even notice. In verse 36, we are told that when Jesus heads across the sea with his disciples, “other boats were with him.”

I’m certain you’ve heard the news by now. Nine Black people were murdered Wednesday night at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The gunman, a White man, reportedly attended Bible study and prayed with his victims before he opened fire, killing most of those in attendance, including Clementa Pinckney, pastor and a state senator. I’ve mostly been glued to the coverage of this event, both via social media and cable news. I fell asleep for a short while Wednesday night knowing that yet another horrendous, racially-motivated act had been carried out against my people in the land that I call “home.”

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

c. 2015 Religion News Service (RNS) Twenty years after the Southern Baptist Convention passed its landmark resolution on racial reconciliation, has it made any real progress?...

c. 2015 USA Today...

c. 2015 USA Today “He was a giant, a legend, a moral compass.”...