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As a young minister in my early 20s, I was often admonished by the senior ministers to keep a guarded distance from laypeople. To get too close, they would say, is to become too familiar with a resulting loss of one's ministerial authority. They thought authority was protected by distance and diminished by relationships.

My Presbyterian granddaughter hasn’t heard about 500 years of conflict over “the real presence.” At her cousins' Catholic church, she washed down the wafer with a large gulp from the cup—and then another.

All I remember from The Magic Stones is the image of a young man, some stones and blocks, and an experiment revealing the most perfect shape.

In years and decades to come, we’ll remember the last two weeks. The Emanuel A.M.E. massacre, the sudden shift away from the Confederate flag, the Supreme Court’s reaffirmation of the Affordable Care Act and its extension of same-sex marriage to every state. Last Friday there was an awesome funeral service for Clementa Pinckney, the pastor of Emanuel and one of the victims in the shooting. And all of it while once again black churches have been burning, some under suspicious circumstances. For all of America’s secularization, actual and expected, each event was resonant with religious significations—and each prompted a wave of public theology.

I’ve been leading a meditation group on Fridays at 4 p.m. for the past three years. It never really took off, though, until this year, when I became serious about my own meditation practice.

This week it's harder than usual to watch big-budget news media keeping things light. It's hard to watch them spend much time on anything other than the scourge of white supremacy that persists in this country. Since 9/11, white terrorists have been a deadlier threat here than the jihadist variety, even before the Charleston massacre. Last month, three black female clergy in South Carolina received death threats. Oh, and black churches keep ending up on fire.

Christianity is thriving in Singapore. And in this case, most of the usual explanations for Christian expansion in Asia fall flat.

Amid the chorus of Facebook likes and rainbow images, it was easy to overlook a third critical SCOTUS ruling.

A few years after Howard Stephens started providing abortions, he became the target of local anti-abortion protesters. They picketed his home on weekends, distributed leaflets around his neighborhood calling him a murderer, followed his moves around town, and sent hate mail to his son. Perhaps most concerning, the protesters picketed Howard’s church twice.

Within ten minutes on Monday morning, I ran into not one, but two news stories covering the “Christian reaction” to the Supreme Court’s ruling last week affirming the rights of citizens to same-sex marriage. At first I was annoyed by the stories’ characterization of Christianity, but now I’m not so sure.