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It is disingenuous to deem ourselves alien to a culture and society we benefit from—a culture and society we created.

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One of the prevailing myths in North America’s mourning-avoidant culture is that within a relatively brief time after a loved one dies, we will want and receive closure. Living in liminal space and profound pain, we yearn to end such grief, to lose the sense that we’re on the bridge to nowhere. After our 25-year-old daughter Krista died while volunteering in Bolivia, as parents we heard the term often.

My daughter has a pet plant, Vivaldi. He’s a succulent, and a nice, bushy one, too. But it wasn’t always that way for Vivaldi. When she first brought him home from the nursery, she was given special soil and instructions to “be careful not to overwater a succulent.”

On election day, the Republicans will keep the House, the Democrats may lose the Senate, and 1,000 more immigrants will be deported.

I understand Resident Aliens as a response to the sort of civil religion that makes people worse than they would be otherwise.

Resident Aliens affirmed the strange way we Americans deal with our racial history and its current realities by indirection, innuendo, and avoidance.

I find more than a dozen military references in the Pauline corpus. In Philemon, Paul includes in his greetings “Archippus our fellow soldier.” In this week's second reading, Paul advises his readers to stand firm and strive side by side. The former Roman soldiers living in Philippi would have heard a reference to a Roman military formation.

There’s no feeling quite as depressing as a line of connection being suddenly cut short. Ministers have this sensation a lot. We’re often lonely in a crowded room.

U.S. religious congregations are marching to their own drums now more than ever....

I've spent the last few months in guilty inactivity. I've discovered that the world doesn't seem to need me to improve it.

The books I've read repeatedly are the ones that have probed my heart and expanded my vision.  

"At the same time that the twin towers were falling, ...

So Ted Cruz made quite a scene at the In Defense of Christians gala dinner the other ...

Thomas Merton poured out his restless, searching, and wondering soul in his journals, which add up to more than a million words. Another monk once asked him why he wrote everything down....

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A recent gathering shows how Middle Eastern Christians can put aside their disagreements and take up the cause of their beleaguered sisters and brothers, said Andrew Doran, executive director of In...

As the Poolesville Community Garden winds down its first year of operation, it's been great seeing the church and our partnership with local businesses, Poolesville Green, and the town of Poolesville, Maryland, thrive. It's exciting, and a blessing, because gardens are a wonderful, amazing way to be fed.

America is extraordinarily tolerant of the NFL. “Pro football, it seems, can do anything but drive us away,” wrote the Chicago Tribune’s Phil Rosenthal in August. He described moves the NFL has made that would ruin another business: undercut your partners, maintain a nonprofit status while paying huge executive salaries, accept unnecessary public subsidies, stay out of Los Angeles so your teams can use the prospect of moving there as leverage to keep demanding those subsidies. And this: alienate women, who make up 45 percent of the NFL’s viewership.

John McKee Barr constructs a persuasive narrative of Lincoln loathing—by Lost Causers, neo-Confederates, libertarians, and even some liberals.