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I love looking at old photographs; it’s the closest thing to time travel that I know. I find myself staring at century-old black and white photos taken on the streets of large cities....

Not long ago donkey-drawn plows turned the soil over in fields of sorghum and peanuts near Bela village. But today the village is deserted. In 2003, Arab militias killed 37 people and drove the survivors away. Now there is only silence—the sound of genocide in slow motion. The grass and weeds growing up amidst skeletons of burned huts are proof that the world hasn’t cared enough to stop the violence and bring the people of Bela home.

"Families are weird.” This is the mantra of a pastor friend, his way of coping with the manifold complexities of his own family as well as those of the families with whom he ministers....

Some years ago I worked in central London with an organization that reached out to people living on the streets....

This year in Great Britain we marked the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade....

"America!...

They can laugh about foxhole religion but every front line soldier embraces a little religion and are not ashamed to pray....

Contemporary Christian homiletics has taken a wrong turn. Reaching out to speak to the world, we fell in—face down....

As part of a comprehensive review of our curriculum at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, we recently a...

In his 30 years as a music critic in New York and London, Paul Griffiths has published more than 2 million words about classical music....

A leading religious journalist who is a columnist and editor at the Toronto Star has written a sort of handbook for thinking about Islam h...

“I’m not a fan of heist movies, where the mechanics of the heist are lovingly detailed....

In the year after the tsunami destroyed the Sri Lankan coastline, lawmakers threatened to pass a law making Christian evangelism illegal....

I spent most of the day after Hurricane Katrina checking on members, especially older ones, in and around Clinton, Mississippi, where I live....

A few years ago one of my adult children picked up a book of theology I was reading, leafed through a few pages, then asked, “Dad, why are you still reading this stuff?” Good question....

In a small-group setting at the World Council of Churches Assembly in 2006, a Paraguayan couple timidly mentioned their concerns about the United States building a military base in their country....

Smokin’ hymns: The Anglican Church in Jamaica is adding to its hymnals some tunes by reggae stars Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, including Marley’s hit “One Love” and Tosh’s “Psalm 27.” Both men were Rastafarians—a group that mixes Old Testament prophecy, Afrocentric social advocacy and the sacramental smoking of marijuana (RNS).

The second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has come and gone, and the storm’s devastation continues to take its toll—sometimes in ways that are the consequence of human negligence, indifference, i...

The collapse of immigration reform legislation is best understood not as a failure of short-term political leadership, but rather as an inevitable long-term consequence of NAFTA. NAFTA’s architects believed that as goods and services began to flow in unprecedented volume throughout the world’s largest free market, low-wage labor would remain largely fixed.Unfortunately, the unleashed forces of the free market uprooted longstanding social and economic arrangements in Mexico and caused the already meager economic opportunities, especially in the rural parts of the country, to evaporate. Millions of Mexican people—the bearers of cheap labor—were compelled to seek out their most rational reallocation.

Pastor R. C. Blakes has two flocks in two different cities....