Martin E. Marty

Do you remember how zealous you were about reaching “perfect attendance” marks in grade school? How careful you were about avoiding the first “absent” day?...

As we collect ever more evidence about times past and places afar, we find that there seem to have been no times or places when or where environmental edens existed (at least not since the original...

Rats! I’ve been found out. We squeakers-by hope to slide through life without ever having our fallibilities and failings found out....

The Fabric of Hope: An Essay, by Glenn Tinder
The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope, by Andrew Delbanco

Readers send us instances in which misused words, typographical errors or strange turns of phrase provoke chuckles....

In a Journal of the American Academy of Religion article titled “Capital Punishment and Human Sacrifice” (March 2000), Brian K....

"Admiral, the great navy of the State of Nebraska,” my 1991 citation from Governor Ben Nelson of Nebraska declares....

Every half century or so the Christian Century moves its offices. As our old Dearborn Street neighborhood seems to be “going condo,” we moved to Michigan Avenue last autumn....

General Mills recently tucked a CD-ROM containing the Bible into 12 million cereal boxes and then had to issue profuse apologies for having done so as it withdrew the offensive inclusions....

Question: Who had reason to vandalize the statue of Carl von Linné, a.k.a....

Like red wine, which we biblical literalists are commanded to take now and then, coffee, unanticipated in the scriptures, offers both an enhancement of and a threat to health....

We’re in the Money!” announces the cover of Christianity Today (June 12). “How Did Evangelicals Get So Wealthy, and What Has It Done to Us?” the subhead asks. Michael S....

Cats, they say, have nine lives. My cat columns, I say, will have only two. My first (April 5) was a pioneering, tentative but catastrophically flawed venture into the aelurophilic world....

For my sister Mildred’s 50th wedding anniversary, our clan is gathering in Fort Wayne this summer....

Judging by the typos in a recent sample of church bulletins, the pleasures of the senses haunt the unconscious minds of many Christians. Food is, of course, high on the list....

A bore, they tell us, is someone who, when you ask him how he is, tells you. “Let me tell you about my operation,” he says....

Missionaries’ faith—the kind of faith that inspired and impelled men and women to take the gospel into all the world—seems to lie beyond poet Oliver Reynolds’s ken....

Some years ago a writer in the Washington Post made a snide comment about evangelicals of the southern persuasion, saying that they were dim-witted ignoramuses....

On a recent trip to the University of Notre Dame to speak at a conference on “Religion, Spirituality and Business,” I stopped at a toll-road fast-food, fast-fuel station....

Years ago I wrote about the tendency of modernist, evolution-minded, progressive, pacifist theists to live long lives. Someone once asked Vida Scudder the secret of her longevity....