John Buchanan

A stretch of two weeks at the beach allows me to do something I’ve never able to manage during the working year: read more than one book at a time—maybe six or seven—and experience the literary and...

I am not a high-tech person. That’s partly due to age, partly to disposition. The very mention of my technological skills sets my colleagues and family to snickering....

One of the ways to divide the human race, I have concluded, is between those who can tell a good joke and those who cannot. Some people are joke-telling experts....

It’s high summer, and those of us who measure time by the mystical rhythms of baseball are deeply immersed in the game. We have been talking lately about the Sammy Sosa affair....

Being the pastor of a small church is hard work. I know; I was one once. And the rewards are relatively modest by anybody’s standards....

A painful accompaniment to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is the estrangement it has caused between mainline Protestants and Jews....

We’ve received a small but steady stream of letters objecting to the advertisements in our pages for military chaplaincy....

I am mostly a utilitarian reader....

As bombs were dropping in Baghdad, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the question of whether it is legitimate to consider racial identity in setting university admission policies....

I didn’t know Lewis Smedes very well, but I miss him....

When Michael Harrington wrote The Other America 40 years ago, he pointed out that the advent of freeways linking suburban homes to downtown offices had rendered the poverty of the inner city...

Resurrection has always been a novel, revolutionary doctrine,” N. T. Wright reminds us. His article on the resurrection (p....

Somehow I managed to get a theological education and practice several decades of parish ministry without encountering the idea of spirituality....

What kind of country are we, and what kind of country do we wish to be? Robert Bellah has asked that question many times and in many ways over the years....

Those of us who have had some experience of theological education in a sense live out of that experience for the rest of our lives. Each experience is unique, of course....

No one knows more clearly or more uncomfortably the tensions of life lived between the gospel and economic necessity than a parish clergyperson whose text for the day is “do not worry about your li...

I began my ministry as a “new church development” pastor in a small town in northwest Indiana. The new congregation grew out of an older nondenominational church....

At the Christian Century lecture in September, about 200 people gathered for a festive evening to meet author Kathleen Norris. Her topic that evening was not exactly festive, however....

The church I serve is located in the midst of one of the busiest retail merchandizing areas in the country. Our closest neighbors are Bloomingdale’s, Marshall Field and Lord & Taylor....

When I was a youngster my parents always took me to community Thanksgiving services. I was an unwilling and unhappy participant....