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c. 2014 Religion News Service NEW YORK (RNS) If the story of the Garden of Eden is such a common cultural reference point, what more can be said about it?...

Joseph knows what he is seeing. His brothers do not.

Three faiths esteem Jonah, whom God sent to the city now called Mosul.

I recently officiated at the funeral for one of my beloved uncles, my dad's brother-in-law, Roger. He was 90, so he lived a good long life, just the past few years in a local nursing home, confined to a wheelchair. He and my Aunt Norma were married for 65 years, which is a pretty good run, in my book. My aunt and their three children and families were there, at the funeral, and I was honored, and a little nervous, to speak to them. 

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Interesting exchange last week between Rod Dreher and Andrew Sullivan, two fine bloggers often at odds with both major parties and sometimes with each other, too....

When Philadelphia’s St. Paul Baptist Church hired the Rev....

c. 2014 Religion News Service...

Police cars have been repainted to say “Islamic Police.” Women are forbidden to wear bright colors and prints....

For thousands of Central American children fleeing threats of gang violence, the multiweek journey to the United States has meant trusting human smugglers, hitching rides through Mexico, and hoping...

Yoder defined violence in terms of violating someone's dignity. This sounds ready made as a description of his own abusive behavior.

It's an old saw: When Protestants say “the Bible” they mean the New Testament, when they say “the New Testament” they mean Paul, and when they say “Paul” they mean Romans. I was looking forward to this opportunity to write Living By the Word. Then I received the specific Sundays I was assigned, and I confess I rolled my eyes a little. I could be yet another Presbyterian to write on Romans! I went with Romans anyway.

My daughter Krista died when she was 25. She was doing volunteer service in Bolivia, and a bus she was traveling on plunged over a cliff. Moses Pulei, who is from Kenya, met Krista in college. He flew from southern California to Spokane, Washington, to attend her memorial service. At the reception, he approached my husband and me. “In the Masai tradition, when someone dies, our gift is to go to their home and share a story,” he said. “May I come over?”

Paul said "the foolishness of the cross," not "the stable middle class lifestyle," if you want my opinion on seminary education, the changing economy, and baptismal identity in general. We bear a responsibility to care for one another as Christians (and beyond) that we have abdicated to the persnickety "marketplace." It's time to talk about holy poverty again.

Cuba possesses the conditions often cited to explain Pentecostal growth: rapid social change, economic turmoil, and excluded ethnic groups.

I slid off the trail and let my daypack fall from my shoulder to the duff below. For the first time in 15 weeks, my soul felt like it was loose, not lassoed by its feet and dragged behind its own horse. I had been so wrapped up in graduate school and work that I had lost touch with my sense of feeling alive, of being connected to anything besides production.

Reading David Brooks sometimes makes me want to tear my newspaper to shreds, throw the shreds in the fireplace, and douse them in something that burns even faster. Of course, my fireplace is decorative and my newspaper’s actually a laptop, so I control myself. Brooks would approve. He likes self-control.

"I haven't become less pro-Israel....

ROME (RNS) Meriam Ibrahim, the Sudanese woman sentenced to death for refusing to renounce her Christian faith and then spared after an international campaign, left Italy today (July...