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A small Catholic college in Massachusetts has been pressured by the local bishop into canceling an invitation to Senator Ted Kennedy’s widow to deliver t...

Over my 12+ years in ministry, lay and ordained, I’ve had a number of nurturing and supportive mentors and guides—spiritual directors, coaches and professors. Now I’m ready for someone to scare the bejesus out of me. Or scare the Jesus into me.

The Century's sort-by-lectionary-day tool exists primarily as a way of organizing past Living by the Word columns and Blogging toward Sunday posts in a useful way. But we also put other content there--anything from the magazine or blogs that happens to deal with a given lection in a way that could plausibly be useful to a preacher or worship planner. So, while our lectionary columnists and bloggers mostly focus on Sundays, the lectionary pages have also collected a good bit of content related to the additional holy days of the (weekly) lectionary.

New today from the Century: John Buchanan on life after resurrection, Marilynne Robinson's lectionary column for Low Sunday, more.

c. 2012 Religion News Service WASHINGTON (RNS) Religious leaders on Thursday (March 29) delivered more...

c. 2012 Religion News Service (RNS) An umbrella group of Christian denominations committed to combating...

(ENInews)--The Church of Scotland is making a high-tech move to protect its 1,600 churches and buildings from metal theft, a newly-popular...

Berlin (ENInews)--As Palm Sunday and Holy Week get closer, Catholics and Protestants are cooperating on a new website that allows German...

c. 2012 Religion News Service VATICAN CITY (RNS) Vatican officials traveled this week to the island of...

Saralee Howard remembers the woman who walked into the Shared Pregnancy Women’s Center in Lansing, Michigan, last year and asked for an ultrasound even though she was leaning toward an abortion....

You may recall that this ending of the Gospel of Mark, the one that appears in the most ancient manuscripts of the book, seemed too abrupt to later copyists. Before long, 11 more verses had found their way there, a busy digest of post-resurrection experiences from a variety of sources: John's account of the scene at the tomb with Mary Magdalene, John's story of Thomas the doubter, a version of the walk to Emmaus, an account of Jesus' ascension, other material from Luke/Acts. These are entered almost as bullet points. But the tacked-on verses need not concern us here--the Revised Common Lectionary walks away from them politely. We are left with the bald confusion and fear at the end of the ancient tale, from a time before it was canonized and liturgized.

Yesterday was a long day. I'm now working not one but two part-time church-music jobs; I'm with the Lutherans by morning and the Methodists by night....

New today from the Century: Crunching the American-religion numbers, showing up for Holy Week, more.

A Separation is a highly ambitious piece of work. It successfully tackles a range of topics and themes, from class, religion and gender to pride, guilt and justice. It is a tale that appears uniquely Iranian but quickly transcends physical and spiritual borders to portray the difficulty of doing the right thing under difficult, even life-threatening circumstances.

The Census Bureau avoids collecting data about religion. So most of what we know is based on what people reveal to independent researchers.

Seekers often want Christianity to be a set of ideas one knows to be true, or at least to provide a feeling of certainty.

Driving through a mini-snowstorm, I thought I might see a snowbow. But it never materialized--and once again, none of the snow stuck.

In Suzanne Collins's trilogy, and the recent movie adaptation of the first book, the Hunger Games are a nationally-televised spectacle in which 24 randomly chosen teenagers are forced to fight to the death in a man-made arena. The annual Hunger Games are an instrument of oppression by the Capitol--the center of totalitarian power that survived a rebellion--to remind the 12 districts under its power just how powerless they are. The citizens of the Capitol love the Hunger Games. To them it is pure entertainment. To the citizens of the 12 subservient districts, it is a form of torture. Their children and neighbors become murderers or victims, and they are forced to watch (literally--viewing is mandatory). There is a paradox at the heart of The Hunger Games' appeal.

New today from the Century: Notes from the farm; longing for certainty; "Kill them all, Katniss!"

Here are some things I read recently but didn't get around to blogging about: An anti-bullying session for fifth-graders, a guide for avoiding sexist campaign coverage, more.