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Our Lent lectionary blogging will consist of individual posts by a variety of contributors....

O Lord, the house of my soul is narrow; enlarge it that thou mayest enter in. It is ruinous, O repair it! It displeases thy sight; I...

I’m always interested in what my friends are reading, and I find that people tend to ask me about what I’ve been reading....

Signs of the times: An atheist group in the United Kingdom is posting signs on buses that say: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” An American group posted a similar message on buses in Washington, D.C.: “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake” (New York Times).

Since the November presidential election, friends, colleagues and casual acquaintances throughout the United States and across the world have written me and claimed Barack Obama as the son of their...

Paul Ouderkirk was on retreat in Dubuque on May 12, 2008, when someone tapped him on the shoulder and asked him why he wasn’t 75 miles away in Postville. The Catholic priest did not know that earlier that day, federal authorities had launched the nation’s largest ever single-site immigration raid on the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant in Postville and arrested 389 people. The Spanish-speaking Ouderkirk had served St. Bridget’s Catholic Church in Postville—a quiet community of 2,400 people—before his retirement. When he heard about the government’s action, he returned immediately to Postville and resumed his role as parish pastor.

Robert Handy, who studied under legendary scholars like Paul Tillich before becoming a prominent Baptist historian, died January 8 at a retirement community in West Caldwell, New Jersey, Jan...

The religious makeup of the new 111th Congress roughly matches the overall American religious landscape, with overrepresentation among Jews and Mormons, according to a new analysis by the no...

Two years ago, when U.S....

The American Civil Liberties Union has sued the federal government, charging that it allows the U.S....

Two top leaders of a fundamentalist plural-marriage sect living in a commune-style compound called Bountiful in British Columbia have been arrested and charged with practicing polygamy....

Richard John Neuhaus, an activist Lutheran minister who became a prominent Roman Catholic priest, is being remembered for his influential role in the rise of religious conservatism....

An American Catholic theologian censured by the Vatican for “grave doctrinal errors” has been told to cease teaching about the nature and identity of Jesus Christ....

When minister Ed Dobson set out to live like Jesus for a year, he didn’t plan on stirring up controversy. Then again, Jesus stirred up plenty....

Evangelical pastor Rick Warren has offered to open the campus of his California megachurch to conservative Anglicans who have broken with the Episcopal Church....

Episcopal bishop J....

In a time when people are profoundly confused about fundamental identity issues and desperately trying to construct life as best they can, it is critical that pastors recover the poetic dimension of their ministries. What the congregation needs is not a strategist to help them form another plan for achieving a desired image of life, but a poet who looks beneath the desperation to recover the mystery of what it means to be made in God’s image.

“You can’t understand Africa without understanding religion,” said Emmanuel Katongole, a Catholic priest from Uganda....

“I am looking for a way to vocalize, perform, act out, address the commonly felt crises of my time,” Terry Tempest Williams writes in her new book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World (Pantheon...

For Christians (as for religious people of various sorts), music is a basic human activity. We cannot live without worshiping, and we cannot worship without making music....