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So much of the debate over Indiana’s new religious freedom law revolves around the gap between the letter of the law and the politics behind it. Supporters note that the law doesn’t mention gays and lesbians, and that similar laws (though not identical ones) have been on the books in other jurisdictions for years. Opponents point to the fact that the law’s advocates organized support for it with arguments about protecting business owners who object to being vendors for same-sex weddings. They're both right, just about different things.

In March 1933, the United States stood on the brink of ruin. Twenty-five percent of the population was unemployed; many people had not worked for several years. The situation was even worse in cities with major industries, where unemployment surpassed the national average. Yet the real worry of the era cannot be captured by statistics alone. 

I have been thinking about the wounds people carry, those unbearable weights that take their toll on our bodies and hearts.

Thomas knows Jesus as incarnate. He cannot easily make the leap to Jesus’ new condition. It’s easier for us, because we consider the story in a different order.

(The Christian Science Monitor) Reverberations from a Saudi-led armed intervention in Yemen have reached Lebanon, where another potent...

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

A leading group of Latino evangelicals has called for an end to state-sanctioned capital punishment, the first national association of evangelicals to do so....

The driver would only take me to Mejicanos once he talked to my contact at St. Francis of Assisi's. The church is neutral territory in a bloody landscape.

When my mother died early on a spring evening in 1993, the ladies of the garden club and the bridge club gathered around my family to stand sentinel over the old-fashioned ritual of paying calls on the bereaved.

You have two choices when you feel it happening. You can let your heart stretch to the point of ripping open to the beauty and agony of living in this mortal world. Or you can pull the protective shield back over the vulnerable center.

These two biblical books may be “loose cannons in the canon,” but Pauw makes a case for how they are as relevant now as ever....

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

(The Christian Science Monitor) On a steamy day on the Kenyan coast, a tall student stands at the courtyard water pump at her school f...

Southern Baptists did not mince words about their racist past during a two-day summit in Nashville devoted to making churches more diverse....

In Better Call Saul, Vince Gilligan takes characters he created for Breaking Bad and deepens and humanizes them

I’ve only seen three dead bodies in my life. The first was when I was 12 years old and my grandfather died at age 69. It was the first time I ever saw my father cry. At the funeral home, my sister was brave enough to reach out and touch my grandfather’s hand as it rested on his torso. Back in our seats, I asked her what his skin felt like. “Plastic,” she said.

My review of Steven Brill's Obamacare book is up today:...

For a few years I was what you might call tri-vocational: I pastored a church, I wrote books and spoke to groups and retreats, and I parented three elementary-age children along with my husband. Life was a wonderful crazy-quilt of scheduling: writing an article at the library down the street from the piano teacher, finishing a sermon in the bleachers at swim practice. It also wasn’t sustainable, I now realize.

On her debut, this Duke Divinity School grad from South Carolina delivers inspired surprises to engage and delight the listener....

It’s easy to imagine health-care reform that does more than the ACA. It's almost impossible to see it getting enacted, as Steven Brill's book reminds us.