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Giving up stuff: In an effort to combat consumerism, Dave Bruno is taking a “100 thing challenge”: he aims by November 12 to have whittled his personal possessions down to 100 items. By personal items he means things that are totally his, not items shared with family members. And some things, like books, he groups together as a category (though he is considering trying to get his own library down to 100 titles). Bruno, owner of a Christian audio book company, is blogging about his efforts at a guynameddave.com.

On the southern shore of Lake Superior, rugged edges of deep green forest merge with cliffs of sandstone and million-year-old granite to mark a remote corner of the Upper Peninsula that economists often call America’s “second Appalachia.” For those who live here, it has become a battleground between an international mining company and a patchwork coalition of residents, fisherfolk, church leaders, environmentalists and an Indian tribe.

Gary B. Walter was elected the ninth president of the Chicago-based Evangelical Covenant Church June 25 at the denomination’s annual meeting in Green Lake, Wisconsin....

Unitarian Universalists ended their annual General Assembly in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last month with a call to oppose ballot measures in Florida and California that would outlaw same-sex...

Jewish groups said the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s recent call for peace in the Middle East is an “important step forward” in repairing relations between the two sides after several years of acr...

The host bishop at a global Lutheran conference in Tanzania raised the thorny issue of homosexuality in his sermon opening the meeting of the main governing body of the 68-million-strong Lutheran W...

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain visited evangelists Billy and Franklin Graham for “a very excellent conversation” at the elder preacher’s North Carolina home June 29...

An Episcopal Church court has unanimously found Bishop Charles E....

A Civil War–era law that lets Virginia churches keep their property when leaving a denomination where a “division” has occurred is constitutional, a county judge has ruled, siding with 11 for...

The archbishop of Canterbury has declared that conservatives’ plans to usurp his leadership in the Anglican Communion are “problematic in all sorts of ways,” saying Anglicans must renew— not dismis...

Adopting a federal program criticized strongly by some liberals, Senator Barack Obama says he would expand and improve President Bush’s initiative to fund religious charities and community ministri...

The nation’s largest Presbyterian denomination has again pushed open the door to ordaining noncelibate gay and lesbian clergy, though the decades-old fight is far from over....

Unless we understand something of life in the first century, says archaeologist Jonathan L....

The new atheist movement has reached its high-water mark, and there are signs that it is starting to recede. Wishful thinking, you say?...

In the 1960s, famed community organizer Saul Alinksy, Arthur M....

Walking on water is an iconic, superhero thing to do. In a mighty display of divine power, Jesus strolls across the Sea of Galilee and then stills a strong wind....

How do you summon compassion when you’re depleted?

One of the teenagers killed in Colorado’s Columbine High School shootings in 1999 was Cassie Bernall. Soon after her murder, reports emerged about how one of the shooters had found Bernall under a table, pointed a gun at her head and asked, “Do you believe in God?” She said yes and was promptly shot.Within weeks of that event I heard a sermon at an Episcopal church praising Bernall’s witness and urging Christians to imitate her faithfulness. Prognosticators predicted another Great Awakening in American life sparked by Bernall’s martyrdom.

A few days after 9/11, a good friend of mine called to ask me to help preside at the funeral of his son, age 26,...

"It’s happening again,” said the 17-year-old seated next to me on the airplane....