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After decades, it's clear that the embargo of Cuba has had little political effect. George Schultz, secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, called the embargo "a failure by any measure"; it has served only to help impoverish Cubans while doing nothing to make them freer.

Along America's highways, wooden barns used to reign, and blue or white silos stood like sentries. Today those wooden barns and silos are decaying, their wooden ribcages emerging like skeletons after years of neglect, and slowly being replaced by low steel buildings. Under this seemingly innocuous change in architecture lies a great American drama.

When I am blessed with a little more leisure time than usual, I like to spend some of it with poetry.

At the peak of its membership in the 1960s, City United Methodist Church in Gary, Indiana, had 3,000 members.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu has announced his intention to wind down his public engagements when he turns 79 this October....

I’m always a little on edge when I spot visitors at church, especially truly new people who are checking out our congregation for the first or second time....

There clearly has been a marked rise of interest in the Crusades since the start of the present war in Iraq--an interest spurred at least in part by President George W. Bush's talk of an American crusade against terror in the days following the 9/11 attacks. Up to this point, the renaissance in publications about the Crusades largely has been limited to works that fit squarely within traditional historical scholarship. Stark and Housley, on the other hand, provide Crusades volumes for an age in which information is targeted to distinct and splintered interest groups.

Grandma and Bob got along famously. They complemented one another: Grand­ma was hard of hearing and Bob was almost blind.

I performed my ministry with a recurring doubt in my head: Am I truly intended and called for this work?

As the sour economy and aging buildings wreak havoc on church budgets, United Methodists are trying to get ahead of the problem and assess the health of their congregations in a bid to reverse declining fortunes.

The problem with liberal theology, Protestant or Catholic, says Rodney A. Howsare in Balthasar: A Guide for the Perplexed, is that Christ comes too late into the picture.

Why would anyone want to read a theologian's memoir? The answer is not immediately self-evident. One can admire a thinker or an artist and still not be drawn to the person's life story.

Barely visible among the high-rise apartment buildings and cocktail lounges, a battered steel door in Manhattan's trendy Tribeca neighborhood leads to a basement jammed with barefoot men praying on...

Prayers linger in choir stalls, soak into walls. Centuries of prayer can make you feel buoyant in medieval European cathedrals. Gratitude settles over you like a benediction within busy urban shrines.

I should have seen my road to Damascus moment approaching. I’d been warned.

My grandmother was 14 years old and living on a farm in Michigan when she made an appointment with her Presbyterian minister to tell him that she felt called to the ministry....

Neil Jordan's Ondine is a lovely picture, but it's so gentle and understated that it's attracted little attention....

In Williamsburg, Virginia, where I live, the fraternities and sororities of The College of William & Mary invite new members in (and leave others out). What's in and what's out translates cunningly into who's in and who's out.

After a five-month absence, parts of Port-au-Prince looked marginally better than when I had last seen the city in February. At least some debris from the January 12 earthquake had been removed. But generally, the city seemed at a standstill.

Bishop Mark S. Hanson, the out­going president of the Lutheran World Fed­eration, appealed to delegates at the LWF gathering in Ger­many to hold together and avoid splits in the face of differences over issues of sexuality.