Latest Articles

Thanks for reading my blog. Here are the 13 posts people read the most this year.

If positive thinking leaves you cold, Oliver Burkeman's The Antidote will be just what the title promises.

In the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, my dad couldn't sing national songs. The Nazis saw the church's Psalter, however, as innocuous. Little did they know.

I’ve always approached the slaughter of the innocents as a text that demands to be preached whether it’s in the lectionary year or not. Maybe that’s my privileged life talking there—that is, my life where all my children survived childhood without a serious threat. A life where weddings and baby showers are more frequent than funerals. A life where the stability of a home and regular meals were a given.

Here are the Century magazine articles that got read the most online this year. Thanks for reading.

Here are the 13 Tribal Church posts people read the most this year.

The U.S. is the only Western democracy that retains the death penalty. Evan Mandery tells the story of the long legal campaign against it.

In Chicago Christmas begins in November, with the revealing of Marshall Field’s (now Macy’s) Christmas windows and the hanging of golden trumpets on the façade of the grand old department store. Inside, for more than 100 years the Walnut Room restaurant has glistened in its holiday glory with its centerpiece: a stunning Christmas tree. On the fifth floor, Santa awaits his eager fans in Santaland. The store buzzes with shoppers in a crush of shopping bags from Macy’s and other stores up and down the historic State Street shopping district.

The miracle of love is that the more you love, the more alive you are. Keeping Christmas is believing in the transforming power of love.

The budget deal was no grand bargain, but there was one grand outcome: the House Speaker stood up to the insurgent right. Is this the new normal?

As a writer, being a part of denomination has incredible benefits and difficulties. Here are some things I learned about the relationship between the two.

About a decade ago, the rector of our small Episcopal church began to incorporate Spanish into the liturgy. She didn’t do this because we had Spanish-speaking members. We didn’t. She did it, she said, to remind us that the liturgy doesn’t belong to us alone.

New today from the Century: The editors on the budget deal and the House Speaker, Amy Frykholm on hosting her first Las Posadas celebration, more.

"Religiosity is a driving force more salient than belief. Agreement with specific beliefs is the least likely religious trait to be passed on."

In 1595, the English Jesuit Robert Southwell wrote “The Burning Babe,” a startling, unsettling poem about the incarnation—which means, given Southwell’s rich theological imagination and deep Catholic piety, that it is also a poem about suffering and salvation. And about the human predilection to resist divine love. Three hundred seventy-one years later, Denise Levertov penned “Advent 1966.″