Latest Articles
New Orleans plans for fewer Catholic churches: A massive restructuring plan
Archbishop Alfred Hughes of New Orleans is asking his Catholic flock, including those far from the flood zone, to prepare for a reorganization of Catholic life befitting a church deeply damaged by ...
Church-closing rate only one percent: More "churning" among evangelicals
With a dozen regulars or fewer attending services, the 150-year-old Kinderhook United Methodist Church in rural Illinois near the Mississippi River shut its doors this Easter....
Choosing a seminary: Learned ministry is about all of us
In American theological education, we are in the midst of recruitment season. Applications to M.Div....
Pewless: When to head for the door
This spring a certain Christian layperson has been criticized for not exiting his local church when he disagreed with something his pastor preached. ...
Gifts all around us: John 20:19-23; Acts 2:1-21; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
What happens to a person when the Holy Spirit descends like a tongue of fire? In Acts, those present were filled with the Holy Spirit. We all long for this. We all seek fulfillment. I saw this once when I was conducting a spiritual retreat for members of various 12-step groups. Each person spoke powerfully about how the pain of emptiness in his life had led him down wayward paths. Each had discovered that “you can never get enough of that which will not satisfy.”
The amazing commission: Matthew 28:16-20; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13
There were only 11 disciples on the mountain. The group was incomplete because one had betrayed Jesus and given in to despair....
Take and read
De La Torre brings new light to the book of Jonah when he sets it in conversation with the lives of marginalized peoples....
Take and read
Begbie’s overall project is exploring the place of music in God’s ecology of creation....
Take and read
Two distinguished scholars offer us important new statements about Christian ethics....
The liberal Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton as Controversialist, Essayist, Novelist and Critic. By John D. Coates. Edwin Mellen Press, 206 pp., $109.95...
Books in search of an author
"Of making many books there is no end,” says Ecclesiastes. Certainly more books are made than can be read, and many are produced that probably didn’t need to be....
Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity
This book inaugurates a new series, Oxford Studies in World Christianity, to be edited by Lamin O. Sanneh....
Happiness and the Christian Moral Life: An Introduction to Christian Ethics
This is a book that I believe is right, true and helpful....
A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming
A theological engagement with the current global environmental crisis needs to do four things....
The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy
These are sobering times....
Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
At first glance, Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day looks something like a spin-off television show....
Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction: Christianity and the Battle for the Soul of a Nation
Alasdair MacIntyre famously compared dying for the modern nation-state to d...
Tree of Smoke: A Novel
Late in Denis Johnson’s novel, one of his many defeated, aimless characters, Bill Houston, surveys what Johnson elsewhere calls “the cancelled life”:...
