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In a culture of personalized weddings, is a very liturgical ceremony simply the church nerd's niche? Or might it function as a corrective?

Jimmy Carter rode to the White House in 1976 on the twin currents of his reputation as a “New South” governor and a resurgence of progressive evangelicalism in the early 1970s. Progressive evangelicalism, which traces its lineage to 19th-century evangelicals and to the commands of Jesus to care for “the least of these,” represented a very different version of evangelical activism from that of the religious right.

Obamacare is the Obama administration's singular legislative achievement, a major win squeezed out of a tough fight with an opposition Congress. Years later, the fight continues....

I told a story in church one Sunday. It was not just my story; it was a shared story from my family that had only been told quietly for a long time. Maybe it was a confession. After telling it I felt spent, as if something powerful had moved through me. To be a storyteller is like having an electric current move through your body. 

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A fragmentary papyrus dubbed by Harvard scholar Karen King as the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”—and declared in April after lengthy tests to be an authentic writing from centuries ago—has been challenge...

Compared to other attributes we assign to God, cherishing has received little attention. It’s easily absorbed into the broader category of love. Yet cherishing is a specific kind of love—one the inspires deep commitment.

I realized that she wasn't looking for my help finding a way out of officiating her friends' wedding. What she wanted was my blessing.

Shortly after my most recent move, my long-time boyfriend and I ended our relationship. The next week, I was scheduled to preach.  I'm part of a multi-pastor church, and my colleagues graciously offered to step in and preach in my place. But I was stubborn. I decided that I wanted—no, needed—to preach.

If you haven't read Justice Kagan's dissent to the Supreme Court's pro-governmental-prayer decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway, you should.

One of the most dangerous effects of physical trauma is internal bleeding....

To Robert Ferguson, Calvinist roots lead European-Americans to see all punishments meted out to humans as righteous. Yet ultimate blame for our prisons is our own.

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c. 2014 Religion News Service COLLEYVILLE, Texas (RNS) The smoke, the loud music, and the smell of perfumes trigger uncomfortable memories for Polly Wright....

A London-trained fashion designer has launched a new line of clerical wear for women in the Church of England....

Some ask why a pastor would pass up a chance to draw a young couple into the church. But perhaps that's the wrong question. 

In Jean Thompson’s novel The Year We Left Home, Anita extends an impulsive invitation to a mere acquaintance, Rhonda. Their lives have turned out very differently. Anita enjoys a contented home life with her husband and children, while Rhonda has endured an abusive boyfriend for far too long. So Anita invites Rhonda to her home, and says she can stay as long as she likes. Driving home, Anita contemplates the implications of her sudden act of hospitality.

Recently I had the opportunity to talk about Christian call and vocation with an adult education class. Normally I have this conversation with 17-21 year old people, but last weekend the crowd was a bit older, closer to retirement age. I asked them to think about what society had told them about vocation, what the church had told them and what their experience of vocation had been. The interesting thing this group said was that often vocation only became clear in retrospect. 

Journalist Eliza Griswold has been to Afghanistan (and Pakistan) numerous times since 9/11, where she discovered landays, a centuries-old form of poetry usually composed anonymously by illiterate P...