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Nelson Mandela said that “Desmond Tutu’s voice will always be the voice of the voiceless.” Tutu speaks with such moral clarity and generosity of spirit because he also speaks for a capacious God wh...

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

While the parties in conflict in South Sudan signed a recent peace agreement, it did not include key stakeholders—faith groups among them—making long-term hopes for peace uncertain....

The Episcopal Church lost a major court battle on February 3 when a South Carolina judge ruled that the Diocese of South Carolina legally seceded from the denomination and can retain control of $50...

How can a Christian college build community amid diversity? Some tend toward relativism, others toward fundamentalism. SPU seeks a third way.

As we contemplate mortality and finitude, I wonder if we could treasure washing the dishes.

Over the last few weeks, I have been mulling over an interesting passage from Marilynne Robinson’s fine novel, Lila. The Reverend John Ames, an elderly Midwestern Methodist preacher is in conversation with his much-younger new wife, Lila, who has come to find rest, shelter, and love after a brutally hard life full of abuse and neglect. The conversation is about hell and the final judgment. Lila knows little of theology and metaphysics, but she has questions. Hard questions. How, she wonders, could the many people she has known who struggled and suffered so terribly on earth be made to suffer further in eternity because they didn’t become Christians? Who could believe this?

Medicine always involves trade-offs. With vaccines, we’re not just weighing them for ourselves.

Conservative economist Greg Mankiw has pushed the idea before: raise the gas tax, and offset this by reducing payroll taxes. So has conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, many times. He did it again last month.

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

(The Christian Science Monitor) Prospective Communist Party members in the region of China where Christianity is growing the fastest m...

England could become the first country to allow the creation of human embryos from the DNA of three people to try to eradicate a type of genetic disease that has caused the deaths of thousands of b...

Schools rely on tuition and are reluctant to turn students away. But if debt keeps students from following their call, schools will have failed at their mission.

My dad's descent into depression

Sitting beside my best friend, we tensed as policemen clubbed civil rights protesters. We teared up as Martin Luther King Jr. marched alongside James Bevel, as Coretta Scott King talked with Malcolm X, and as the leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee strained to relate to their elders. Selma was an experience: visceral, soulful, inspiring, and shocking.  A visual image that struck me was based in sound: microphone before King, organ pipes behind him.

Evidently being able to bend over and touch the palms to the floor isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And here I thought I had received high marks for my excellent flexibility. Why did I not learn this until I was 50? To make a long story short, here is my learning: flexibility is great, as long as it is matched by strength. The opposite is true, too—strength is great as long as it is matched by flexibility. So my chiropractor tells me I’m not allowed to stretch anymore, not until I’ve built up some strength. I think this might be true for church, too.

Our normally fractious media and political world has reached an item of consensus: vaccines against deadly diseases are good, and kids should get them. As the Disneyland measles outbreak has brought new attention to the issue of vaccine refusal, prominent politicians have been asked to state their views for the record. Most have obliged with unambiguous statements that vaccines—including the MMR shot, which was linked by a totally discredited study to the incidence of autism—are safe and should be universal. One outlier was Rand Paul, the libertarian senator from Kentucky, who has a tendency to shoot from the hip in just such situations.

Stephen Jay Gould regarded science and religion as addressing different kinds of questions. Owen Gingerich goes a step farther with a more nuanced approach.

Let’s build shrines, Peter says. He doesn’t know how to respond to a mystical mountaintop experience, and he’s afraid.