Latest Articles

First, a confession: I’m not a big fan of my birthday. Actually that’s not quite accurate. I like my birthday just fine, but as an inherently private person I’m not a big fan of others’ expectations of how I should spend my birthday, so I’m deliberate about keeping the actual date under wraps.

Our call is a close call, one that draws us close to the sharp edges of life. "While we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus' sake."

I would never make it as an accountant. I tend to lose focus on details, and I’ve never been too motivated about dollars and cents. Plus I can get philosophical on something as simple as mathematical functions like subtract or multiply. What to some might look like subtraction, a reduction in the bottom line, in God’s economy can be multiplication, compounding and expanding in every direction.

"The Gulf situation is a miniature version of the chicken-and-egg question that bedevils Amtrak as a w...

There’s little for us mainliners to celebrate in this new Pew study. We’re losing people, and fast. I appreciate Heidi Haverkamp’s realistic-yet-hopeful words here and Rob Rynders’ there. But, like them, I’m not interested in spinning an argument that the numbers are somehow lying. The numbers are clearer, however, than the reasons for them.

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

c. 2015 Religion News Service JERUSALEM (RNS) The Vatican’s decision on Wednesday to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state angered Israeli officials....

Sitting outside the central train station in Catania, Italy, a 16-year-old who would only give his name as Simon hunched his knees up to his chest and wrapped himself up into a ball....

Typical superheroes have no religion; they are quasi-religious saviors. This makes the hero of the new Netflix series Daredevil unusual.

Over the years I've heard my share of complaints regarding the "prayer of confession" in weekly worship....

I often think I hear colleagues asking, “How could we attract nuns to our church?” Actually they’re talking about “the nones,” of course. One of the clearest findings of the Pew Forum’s new religious landscape study is that fewer and fewer people have any religious affiliation at all. Catholics and mainline Protestants show the biggest drop.  I feel pretty conflicted about all of this.

Today Lincoln is remembered mostly for his ideals. In his lifetime, people were fascinated with his appearance. This is Richard Wightman Fox's starting point.

The United States is a significantly less Christian country than it was seven years ago....

Amid killings, rapes, and abductions, the humanitarian agency World Vision indefinitely suspended its operations in South Sudan’s Unity State....

The African-American leader who grew up without a father and started his work life as a community organizer had plenty to say about poverty in our “winner take all” economy....

People appeal to Bonhoeffer to justify a range of moral choices. They tend to ignore his emphasis on context and the need for constant discernment.

I went on a walk along the bay in Rhode Island. It was the path I took daily, so I was sure footed and looking at the horizon, until I almost stumbled upon an animal corpse....

A few years ago, during a vacation on the Outer Banks of North Carolina (a place where my family and I go every couple of years), my children were playing with their cousins on the beach. I was taking photos as they frolicked in the gentle surf along the wide expanse of seemingly endless ocean. There were sea and beach creatures, along with colorful shells, that also caught my photo snapping attention. Somewhere in the midst of my attempts at capturing as many “Kodak moments” as I could, I lost my footing and fell.

One of the characteristic idiosyncrasies of Americans is that they are always fretting about their identity. They are a people constantly asking themselves, what does it mean to be a “real American”? There are certain literary figures we can instantly associate with the issue of American identity.

Europe and the Islamic World is a grandly ambitious attempt to sketch the interaction of faiths and regions from the seventh century to the present.