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The theme of James Alison’s video Bible study is the main theme he sees in scripture: that the creation of scapegoats must end.

I try not to post TOO many "you forgot about us mainline Protestants!" posts. The idea comes up almost daily when I'm going through the news and the blogs, but I know that kind of thing can get old so I try to set the bar pretty high. If a person wanted to make this the focus of a blog, however, a person could do worse than to keep a close eye on the Barna Group.

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.