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At lunch with a friend recently, I asked him about his first few years in campus ministry. It's been wonderful, he said. "Slow, patient, immensely rewarding. Frustrating. Growing." Like me, my friend's work on campus is of the church-planting kind. We started talking about learnings. I mentioned my from-time-to-time loneliness. 

It's great that Mark Oppenheimer wrote about the Festival of Homiletics...

c. 2014 Religion News Service...

c. 2014 Religion News Service (RNS) According to the title of his new book, Frank Schaeffer is an atheist....

The head of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary offered an emotional apology to Southern Baptists meeting in Baltimore for accepting a Muslim student into his school’s Ph.D....

Several years ago I remember very off-handedly asking one of the ushers in my congregation how, if they take the attendance count when they are collecting the offering, do they count the children w...

Years ago I was very good at hope. I could hope for a more celebrated position, flatter abs, or to cross the finish of Ironman. I was also good at setting goals to achieve these ends: I put my head down and knocked them off. The elation of accomplishing these goals and garnering a little attention for my efforts was a great high, but unfortunately it did not usually last long.

"This is not leadership....

In two pages, you go from a simple devotional habit to being sucked into the vortex of global power plays. You must be reading Brueggemann.

c. 2014 Religion News Service...

c. 2014 Religion News Service...

New York City’s venerable Union Theological Seminary plans to pull all investments in fossil fuels from its $108.4 million endowment, casting it as part of a bid to atone for the “sin” of contribut...

When we get the age breakdown of the Presbyterian Church's General Assembly, it’s nothing short of horrendous. 91 percent of the laity are 50 and older. 67 percent of the Clergy are 50 and older. A mere 23 percent of all commissioners are under 50. What can we do about it?

In the wake of the shootings in Las Vegas—in which bystander Joseph Robert Wilcox tried to take a shooter out and instead was himself shot and killed—Adam Weinstein offers a very thoughtful take on the notion of being a "good guy with a gun." A veteran and a gun owner, Weinstein describes himself as "one of those wannabe heroes"—but also details his growing doubts.

Every so often, usually between 5 and 9 pm on a Saturday night when I am lurching toward the finish line of another sermon (or grinding my teeth in frustration at the sermon that just won’t come together), a terrifying thought pops into my head.  All of a sudden it occurs to me what a laughable, horrifyingly presumptuous thing it is to get up in front of a group of people and presume to speak on behalf of or about God. This sounds just a touch melodramatic or self-important, I know. 

In this long, freewheeling conversation with the Heidelberg Catechism, Eberhard Busch sometimes uses the document for leverage against distortions in the contemporary church, and sometimes challenges its assumptions.

In adapting my course for video, I had to learn to bridge the distance between me and students I couldn't imagine, let alone see.

c. 2014 Religion News Service...

c. 2014 Religion News Service...

Readers may or may not accept Charles Hefling's reconstruction of the doctrine of original sin. But he continues the tradition of rethinking the faith in light of new knowledge, contexts, and concerns.