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Alain de Botton is offiicially enthusiastic, but his book is wistful. Atheists who pick it up may find themselves undergoing a crisis of faithlessness.

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Experts say mentoring works best one on one. But Lewis Haley found such a need for mentors that he bent the rules.

A long-simmering conflict between the Vatican and American nuns has erupted again with the Vatican’s doctrinal office issuing a scathing critique of a popular book on sexual ethics by Sister Margar...

These parables are like God's joke in the form of an invasive species.

Margaret Farley’s Just Love: A Framework for a Christian Sexual Ethics is at #16 on the current Amazon sales list. When is the last time a sane, scholarly, carefully argued and theologically rich book of sexual ethics ranked that high? I don’t know, but I can’t imagine it was recent. (Four out of the top five on the Amazon list are versions of Fifty Shades of Gray. If only those readers would open up Farley!) To make matters even stranger, the book is six years old and used mostly in seminaries and at religious institutions. The flurry of interest was provoked by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

New today from the Century: A shift to group mentoring, the national need to criticize, more.

When did we become a country of critics? And who wants to live in a society where we pick each other apart all the time? If we don’t watch out, our hyper-judgmental world will lead us to choke out all of our creativity, cultivate a fear of failure and leave us spiritually parched. 

One could judge this book by how many chuckles it evokes. It is good in that department. One could also judge the book by its clever and at times provocative turns of phrases....

Our church tried endless varieties of adult ed opportunities and midweek services, but people didn't come. So we canceled them—all of them.

In Jesus’ day—as in ours--redefining the family is a provocative act with far-reaching social, political, moral and spiritual implications. If we were to isolate Jesus in Mark 3 from the moments in the other gospels in which Jesus interacts with his family, we might conclude this story with George Aichele’s sharply worded assertion, “Mark’s Jesus is no supporter of family values!”

On Saturday, a young man from my congregation died, after a long battle with cancer. Well, I say he was a young man, but he was my age. Yes, he was young....

New today from the Century: When people don't show up, what a congregation is for, more.

Whenever people complain to me about the lack of “realistic” movies out there, I point them to tiny gems such as Ann Hui’s A Simple Life, Hong Kong’s entry for last year’s Oscar for best foreign lan­guage film.

Leaders representing most of the nation’s 57,000 Catholic nuns answered a Vatican crackdown on their group by charging that Rome’s criticisms of the sisters were “unsubstantiated,” caused “scandal ...

A top Southern Baptist official who was accused of plagiarism in a radio segment claiming that civil rights leaders and President Obama used the Trayvon Martin case to stir racial tensions has lost...

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Orthodoxy's roots in Egypt and Ethiopia are ancient. In East Africa there is a younger movement: a native Orthodoxy, locally grown.

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