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On two occasions I decided to become Catholic. Both times I had to wait because I had been asked to preach or preside as a Methodist.

Years ago, at a denominational gathering, I heard a visitor from the global South say the following about North American Christians: They have so many things. They don’t need anything. Yet it seemed like the people were very thirsty, like they were in a desert and we were bringing them drops of water. These words refuse to leave me.

Whenever I go on vacation, I realize again how tangled up my faith practices are with my work....

Most of us have seen this coming for a decade, but it’s still startling to read the headlines in the Atlantic: "The Vanishing of Middle Class Clergy." None of this is news. We know pastors who feed their children with food stamps.

Rhonda Rowe and her team gathered around a diagram of the nursing home’s floor plan and determined how to split up to avoid praying with anyone twice....

Why is so much energy aimed at protesting Israel's occupation of the West Bank? Such actions are unlikely to move the levers of power.

I have many conversations with people who find it difficult to believe or people who barely believe or people who want to believe but can’t or people who are embarrassed to believe or people who look down in condescension at those who believe or people who are just bewildered that anyone could believe in something like God or resurrection or hope or any kind of future that is radically dissimilar to the present. This is the shape of our life and imagination in the post-Christian West.

A particular verse of scripture has been haunting me lately. I hear it as an indictment of an aspect of my personal life. First, it was a lectionary text in Epiphany. Then I found it in the unifying passage of a devotional book I read. “Bring the homeless poor into your house,” we read in Isaiah 58:7, part of a passage on genuine fasting.

"GOP shoves massive tax hike down middle-class voters' throats."...

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A day after most of Mosul’s Christians fled, Islamic State fighters stormed the fourth-century Mar Behnam monastery near the city....

On July 29, 1974, in Philadelphia, 11 women broke rank and were ordained as the first female priests in the Episcopal Church. They became known as the Philadelphia 11....

Half a world away from Europe, where World War I erupted 100 years ago on July 28, Washington National Cathedral marked the occasion with a liturgy created especially for the anniversary....

At a historical art exhibit, I read that the images on display were intended for private devotion. Would it have been subversive of me to pray?

When I, along with a friend and colleague, started planting a new church in Chicago about five years ago, we had lots of ideas about how to do church, but one thing was certain: we wanted to do church differently. Lots of church planters have the same mission. We told other existing churches that we weren’t in competition with them—we wanted to attract people who, for whatever reason, would never set foot in a narthex. In other words, we didn’t want our church to be too. . . . churchy.

I looked at the front of my house and saw some peeling paint. I looked again and saw more peeling paint. This did not make me happy. Just four years ago I painted the house. I know that proper preparation is critical for painting success. I spent days, no, more like weeks, on prep. I power washed. I hand scraped the entire house. Up and down the ladder. I scraped most of the south side of the house down to bare wood. Then I bought good paint, expensive paint. Paint that was supposed to last 25 years. I didn’t really expect 25 years but I was expecting more than four. So last week I washed the front of my house and started removing the peeling paint.

Remember in the fall, when Obamacare's insurance exchanges got off to a shamefully bad start, and people who never liked the health-care law in the first place started cheering its impending doom? Yeah, they were wrong.

Anton Wessels emphasizes points of convergence among the Abrahamic religions, even assimilating their scriptural perspectives into a single story. It's an audacious wager, and not without dangers.