Martin E. Marty

Children’s sermons can be times for cuteness or for expressions of theological realism. Here is a story of such realism....

The Wall Street Journal is now urgent reading for preachers, since its daily stories give evidence that Augustine and Calvin were right....

Suppose you and I were on the dock at the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Suppose you, being well heeled and generous, gave me a dollar (in 2002 currency value) and, a second later, gave me another....

The Holy Ghost is a pedophile. No, that opener does not mean that I have gone off half-cocked or whole-cocked. Blasphemy is not my game, now or ever....

Fifty-five years ago an eccentric and rather egocentric seminary professor called my roommate into his office and asked him to exchange eyeglasses....

Before the recent fight over the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, Americans were in conflict over mounting the Ten Commandments in publicly owned places....

As the whole country knows, evangelist Billy Graham said some things to President Richard M. Nixon—caught on the Oval Office taping system—about American Jews that he now regrets....

Forty years ago, when my kind and I were still young enough to be licensed to write crabby books (they got reviewed as “prophetic”) about American religion, the focus often fell on the public face ...

The wet spring in many parts of the country, including ours, produced mosquito-nurturing ponds. Now the mosquitoes are here....

The United States Supreme Court in Wisconsin v....

A weekly magazine not unfriendly to evangelicals, megachurches and the marketplace recently pointed to a trend disturbing to its editors—and to us....

The American Association for the Advancement of Science sounds like a feet-on-the-ground organization. But in a recent meeting in Boston some scientists took flight, at least in imagination....

Something has gone terribly wrong with Protestant clergy. The majority of them say that they are “happy, content,” as a recent Christian Century news headline proclaims (March 27-April 2)....

The March 3 lectionary texts encouraged Christians to think about water....

In a predictably condescending article on North Dakota in a recent New Yorker (February 18-25), Mark Singer quoted Doug Burgum of Microsoft Great Plains: “We have this deep-seated Scandinavi...

The Marmite centennial in Britain prompts me to develop a thesis: National or creedal groups tend to keep their boundaries strong by pretending to like foods that others find distasteful....

Back when 19th-century Methodists were debating whether to sponsor seminaries and promote a “learned ministry,” one bishop, it was said, opposed the idea....

In a recent story in the Atlanta Constitution John Blake reports on what we might call “grade inflation” among pastors....

Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers is getting lots of publicity these days....

At the beginning of this day, near the beginning of this year, let me suggest that you follow a new morning routine. Don’t rely on coffee alone to get you started....