Latest Articles

Religious affiliation may be on the wane in America, a recent Pew study asserts, but you wouldn’t know it from walking into the storefront near the corner of West 63rd Street and South Fairfield Av...

How do you practice Sabbath in this busy, stressed-out world? Is Sabbath just a luxury for those who don't have kids?

WTF, Evolution? is the most enjoyable Tumblr I've come across this side of the unassailable, if a tad nichier, Every Day I'm Pastorin'. Basically it's pictures of ridiculous-looking animals and then commentary, often in the form of a dialogue between evolution and a bewildered observer.

Politicians in Washington invariably use the term “entitlements” to refer to programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. On the face of it, it’s a neutral term: citizens are entitled to certain benefits if they fit a certain category of need, hence the benefits might reasonably be called “entitlements.” Yet the word carries ideological freight—an implication that people are lazy or self-indulgent to expect these things.

New today from the Century: Debra Bendis on her parents' aging, Jason Byassee on Modern Family, more.

I don't like family sitcoms, so I long avoided Modern Family. But the show catches the way family can be both loathsome and life-giving.

Western Seminary students had both needs and assets. So did the wider community's adults with disabilities.

Like the Century, the Atlantic has been around a while. But they've got some much older archives posted online than we do. (We're working on it, slowly but surely.) Here's an astonishing example: from 1939, a firsthand account the Atlantic published of a German Jew's time in a concentration camp just before the war.

New today from the Century: Seminarians and people with disabilities, the real "hidden prosperity of the poor," more.

When I saw the headline in the New York Times—“The Hidden Prosperity of the Poor”— I thought of something very different than what Tom Edsall’s commentary is actually about. Edsall highlights an insidious and specious argument about income inequality made on the right. In essence, the cost of basic human needs has gone down in relation to income, while consumer goods have become cheaper and cheaper.

Elie (The Life You Save May Be Your Own) has the ability to weave together many small stories to narrate a big story....

The idea that students will reside on a campus and attend classes at specified times seems increasingly quaint.

Where Moses reassured his listeners with the word when, the devil tempts Jesus with the word if.

Someone asked a question along these lines on Facebook recently, asking what one piece of evidence in particular persuades people to adopt the view that they do. There are multiple things that I find particularly indicative. The reference to a dome in Genesis 1 is itself significant. But the point becomes even clearer if one knows other creation stories from the Ancient Near East.

In case you missed it last Friday, the Obama administration quietly issued a proposed update to regulations coming out of the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as "Obamacare." The verbiage is a bit dense, but here's the upshot: the ACA requires health plans to provide contraceptive coverage to all insured members. Some religious organizations and even a few for-profit companies objected to this requirement, citing religious beliefs.

New today from the Century: Lawrence Wood on online seminary, James Alison's lectionary column, more.

For all their problems, churches are often a good deal more self-critical and boldly innovative than seminaries.

Retired Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony has been stripped of his official duties in an unusual public rebuke by his successor that followed the release of thousands of pages of internal church do...

The Obama administration on Friday (Feb....

WASHINGTON (RNS) Standing before the throngs at the March for Life on Jan....