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Without the rudder of memory, my father seemed adrift in a tiny boat on a wild, infinite sea, yet unconcerned with finding a way back to shore.

Last week, evangelical congregations across America began screening a documentary called The Stranger: Immigration, Scripture and the American Dream, produced by a group called the Evangelical Immigration Table. Among EIT's advocates are a host of uncommon bedfellows: Mathew Staver of the Liberty University School of Law and Jim Wallis of Sojourners, Leith Anderson of the National Association of Evangelicals and Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and popular pastors Max Lucado and Wilfredo de Jesús. Immigration reform has attracted such a spectrum of advocates that it shows how it is a fortuitous issue for American Protestants.

The swift and unexpected political demise of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.) at the hands of his own party’s primary electorate last night has already called forth endless analysis. Beaten by an economics professor who ran on a shoestring and whose major source of institutional support came from talk radio hosts, Cantor has been charged variously with focusing too much on preparing to be the next House speaker, with running an ineffective campaign that spent no money on voter contact but $200,000 on steakhouses, with being too soft on immigrants (Cantor proposed a path to legal status for immigrants brought into the country illegally as children), and with being too negative and unfair in his campaign ads. There is even speculation that Cantor was defeated by Democrats voting in Virginia’s open primary. Whatever the mix of factors, the primary defeat of a House majority leader—something that has apparently never happened in the 115-year history of that office—indicates a politician, and a party, caught sleeping by a restless electorate.

The cost of tuition has has gone up 1,200 percent in 30 years. The odd thing is that when a person takes full advantage of the educational system and earn a Ph.D., then the very same universities that have been trying to convince us that education is worth that much inflation, turns around and tells the Ph.D. that their hard work is worth about . . . 1-3K per class for an adjunct teaching position. So the value of education is being cut by the very same people who are trying to sell us an education.

c. 2014 Religion News Service (RNS) If interfaith marriages are supposedly doomed, Dale McGowan’s should have been toe-tagged from the start....

Jeremiah has great resolve—at least in retrospect.

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It wasn't same-sex attraction that worried my fellow pastors. They assumed that being bisexual meant I was being unfaithful to my husband.

The General assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) starts this week in Detroit, Michigan. I have a friend, Rev. MaryAnn McKibben Dana, who’s standing for Vice-Moderator, so I wanted to write a bit about Rev. Dr. John Wilkinson, who is standing for Moderator. 

As I prepared to be ordained recently, my mind kept returning to the people in my life who might be perplexed by this decision. I have friends and colleagues who wonder, quite justly, what the church has to offer that one cannot find elsewhere. I thought about how I might describe what pulls me toward ministry and the church in particular.

Does the study of theology require more skin, more personal involvement, than other types of study? Case study one: Claire is a second-year university student. She has one optional subject and spots a summer school program called Bible and Popular Culture. She has a cousin who grew up religious and it makes for awkward pauses whenever the family get together. She enrolls in Bible and Popular Culture, hoping to gain an easy credit and to help her talk with the "religious" side of her family.

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Is there any chance that people will not sin?

It seems a little backward on the Sunday after Pentecost to receive instructions that have already been successfully carried out. Peter and the disciples blew them away last week, preaching up a storm of fire and spirit like a host of Rosetta Stone experts. But today we go back to the place where Jesus told them what to do: Go and make disciples.

A couple of weeks ago, funeral director Caleb Wilde wrote a blog post about who to seek out when dealing with grief. His basic advice: find a therapist before you seek out your pastor. The reasoning goes that therapists, with their training in the psychological aspects that arise in times of grief, are better qualified than clergy to deal with things like depression. I agree.

John Green was enrolled at University of Chicago Divinity School, preparing to become an Episcopal priest. He was doing his CPE, working as a chaplain when he conceived of The Fault in Our Stars. The book hit the top of the NYT bestseller list and Green didn’t go to Div School. Though, the book might be assigned reading in seminary now. At least Katherine Willis Pershey thinks it should be.

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It's hard to know what to do and what not to do on the Internet. These are new forms of communicating, so we're trying out different rules of engagement. Often our social behavior forms by what gets on people's nerves.