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Why is theological education necessary? What are the conditions of its fruitfulness? Such questions are both basic and perplexing.

I played competitive tennis as a teenager. At one point, a new player started working with my coach. He was a natural athlete—quick, agile, and well coordinated. I was impressed. My coach was not. He said, “That kid will never be any good.”

Yang Jisheng argues that totalitarian states tend to develop policies in a vacuum and find it difficult to change course. Thomas Keneally would agree.

Girls gets attention as a boundary-breaking comedy focused explicitly on gender. But Hannah and friends are not navigating adult life well.

Frustrating news out of North Dakota: one of the most viable longer-range Amtrak routes is being plagued by delays, courtesy of a parade of freight trains hauling crude away from oil-boom country. This is the point where passenger-rail skeptics and government haters generally laugh and say, what else is new? Amtrak’s running late! But our shell of a national passenger rail system has been dealt a pretty tough hand.

I said something cutting and sneering, and my mother slowly put down her tea. Odd that I would remember that detail.

Not many people would think of being pen pals with a terrorist. But Rory Green, a Christian who lives in Nottingham, England, did. After reading about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whom the U.S. government believes masterminded the 9/11 attacks, Green wrote him a letter. 

James MacGregor Burns has authored an eminently readable history of that elusive historical movement we call the Enlightenment.

Churches need to take time to discern their particular Christian formation mission. Only then can they choose curricular resources to support this.

For scholars on race in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, nothing in a recent official article on race and the priesthood was new. The forthright treatment of the subject, however, including repudiating myths that had been used to legitimate the ban on black men from the priesthood until 1978, was a matter of rejoicing for many longtime advocates of racial equality within Mormonism. The heroes of this story, however, are the black members of the LDS Church who refused to leave despite being afforded second-class status.