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Ezekiel steps right into the middle of a group of people busy at that most ancient of activities, going back to Eden: the blame game.

(The Christian Science Monitor) An Iraqi truck driver knows just how Sunni militants are created in Iraq—he nearly became one....

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c. 2014 Religion News Service...

c. 2014 Religion News Service...

The Cubs and White Sox have some of the worst records in the league. Yet Chicago still went a little crazy over baseball this summer.

The image of a resident alien offers an important biblical corrective. But it isn't the only such image we need.

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.