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I’m delighted to be back among the 400-year-old whitebark pine trees of the Wind River Range in northwest Wyoming....

I started to write when I was teaching at Augustana College, but after moving to the University of Notre Dame in 1970 I really began to put words on paper....

It’s tempting to blame partisan politics for last summer’s debacle over “death panels” and the very idea of doctors and patients holding conversations about the end of life. But the truth is: these conversations are difficult. Although some people welcome them, others approach the subject of death cautiously. Many of us would rather not explore what awaits us in the final years or weeks of life. Perhaps this reluctance explains why only one in five Americans has completed an advance directive for medical care.

My contract as “intentional transitional pastor” or interim with East Bay Community Church (not its real name) had expired, and I was working on a month-by-month agreement. By the grace of God, the church and I had moved through five developmental tasks proposed by the Intentional Ministry Network. Healing had taken place, and a sharpened vision statement had been communicated. I was feeling affirmed by the church and knew that its leaders valued my expertise and contribution, as well as me as a person. Then one morning I heard the news: the pastoral candidate would preach the next month, with a congregational vote to follow on the same night.

Short-term mission trips continue to rise in popularity....

Not surprisingly, given that they are selected for Trinity Sunday, today’s texts point to God-in-three....

It’s an ever new story—the building of a great tower, quickly followed by a descent into babble. We citizens of the 21st millennium seem to be standing amid the bricks from our own Babel towers....

There is some high irony in the fact that the United States has come to be commonly recognized as an empire (for good or i...

Brosend makes four claims about how a focus on Jesus’ rhetoric can improve modern preaching: One, Jesus formed his messa...

The Last Station is a complex but entertaining study of a 48-year marriage and the way subtle and extreme changes that take place in each partner can take a terrifying toll on the relationsh...

The first ever Academy Award for Best Picture was given in 1929 to Wings, a World War I aviation drama full of groundbreaking aerial sequences....

Once upon a time, Europe lived in an age of faith, which found buoyant expression in the massive popularity of pilgrimage....

Wondering what it would be like to have his life turned into a screenplay for a movie, Donald Miller a...

A subtitle for this collection of expertly crafted verse might be “A Memoir in Poetry.” Angela Alaimo O’Donnell has arranged the poems so that they loosely f...

Lorrie Moore, whose short-story collections (Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?...

At the heart of this complex and learned book is a single question: Did the apostle Paul regard the gosp...

Acts 2 tells of those who, while seemingly drunk with the new wine of the spirit, actually understand one another’s native languages....

My dad and I fought constantly when I was a teenager. In my adolescent mind, every boundary set by my parents was evidence that they did not trust me or see me as the adult I obviously was....

The Christian militia group known as the Hutaree, whose leaders were arrested by the FBI during Holy Week, is fond of quoting Christian scripture....

Wheeze control: Children with severe asthma who are enrolled in a preventive-care program at Children's Hospital Boston receive free inhalers from insurance companies. The hospital sends nurses to visit families after discharge to make sure children have medicine and know how to use it; it provides home inspections to root out mold; and it offers vacuum cleaners to families who don’t have them. After one year of the program, the hospital readmission rate for young asthma patients dropped by over 80 percent and costs plunged as well. But empty beds meant lost revenue for the hospital (New Yorker, April 5).