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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.

Growing in prayer is not simply acquiring a set of special spiritual skills. It is growing into Christian humanity.

Most of us who work in a church can see parallels between bookstores and church. We had small, physical spaces in which we met and built community. We watched as big-box churches moved in, allowing for many more options, but individuals became much more anonymous in the process. Now, we know there are a growing number of people who are leaving church, but the search for God is still happening digitally.

Books change. They change us individually and collectively. Tom Paine’s direct style convinced countless colonists that it was Common Sense to become an independent nation. Henry David Thoreau lectured New England college students that they were better off hand-crafting knives than they were sitting in stuffy classrooms. He influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.  Books are also changed.

Once, when I was about seven, I jumped into the car after school and grabbed a Thermos rolling around on the floor. I was sweaty and dying of thirst and expecting water, or lukewarm juice, but was hit instead with a mouthful of my mother's leftover coffee. It was horrendous.

The people are hungry. Jesus' solution is even more improbable than the disciples' solution.

They constructed the rainbow-colored crosses on holy ground. That very soil bore witness to the fact that love could overcome discrimination. It was the same plot where the Rev. Leroy and Gloria Griffith were married over forty years ago. 

I'm grateful to Amy Frkyholm for her thoughtful response to my media column on clickbait. I have a religious autobiography similar to Amy's: raised in a highly emotional evangelical/charismatic church, which I left in young adulthood for high liturgy. My response to liturgical forms of worship was very much the same feeling of relief and freedom within structure that Amy describes so well. I appreciate, and in many ways share, her experience with and insight into the pitfalls of coerced emotionality—in worship, church groups, or online. I'm not sure, however, that the parallel between clickbait and worship really works.

On a recent mission trip to New Orleans, I visited Carrollton United Methodist Church, where two brand-new pastors are dreaming of a new venture: a parallel start.

Bart Ehrman's conclusions aren't novel to anyone familiar with historical scholarship on Christology. But those aren't the readers he has in mind.

The Supreme Court reflects the politics of the moment. And two recent decisions are in line with a shift of the current court toward the right.

Instead of seeking the ability to deport Central American children faster, Obama should treat this situation as the refugee crisis it is.