John Buchanan

When unusually balmy weather occurs after a season of cold and snow, some of us cannot resist thinking about baseball....

John Updike, who died January 27 at age 76, was one of the literary giants of our time....

I’m always interested in what my friends are reading, and I find that people tend to ask me about what I’ve been reading....

Every other week, on Thursday afternoon, several editors at the Century gather around a cluster of filing cabinets....

A new administration in Washington brings the promise of new approaches to deadlocked and dangerous international conflicts....

I read somewhere that in a survey to identify what people thought was the most obnoxious holiday or Christmas music, “The Little Drummer Boy” narrowly won out over “Silver Bells” and “Do You Hear W...

Whatever else you might think about the outcome of the election, Barack Obama energized young adults in a way that was reminiscent of John F. Kennedy’s campaign.

Lydie Raschka’s article on her experience of helping serve dinner to homeless and hungry people at Thanksgiving raises issues that I ...

When a Los Angeles Dodger hit a grand-slam home run off of the Cubs’ most reliable pitcher in the first game of the National League division series, a great silence descended on Wrigley Field....

Many of the issues before us in this election year were present at the founding of the nation, as I learned from Joseph J....

Reflecting on the “disestablishment” of the mainline Protestant churches, Walter Brueggemann once observed that those churches and their members are for the time being living in a kind of exile....

As Bill McKibben explains in this issue, people love the Tuscany region of Italy because of its comprehensibility....

There are always far more books than there are hours for reading, so I try to strike a balance between what I think I need to read and what I know I’ll simply enjoy....

I love living in a big city: the energy, the pace, the sirens. I love being able to walk or ride a bus to work, or catch a train to the airport....

Students of Shakespeare know that the bard didn’t create his material solely out of his own imagination, but instead masterfully recrafted stories that were centuries old....

The version of Christianity that appears in the media often embarrasses me: it’s narrow, sectarian, exclusive and sometimes mean-spirited....

When I pack my suitcase for the meeting of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), I often think of the words of 2 Samuel 11:1: “In the spring of the year, the time when kings go ...

The Fourth of July is certainly not a church holiday, but it is an opportunity for the church and the preacher to reflect on the history of the republic, the extraordinary group of leaders who gath...

Last month the United Church of Christ invited its congregations to conduct a “sacred conversation” about race in response to the controversy swirling around Trinity United Church of Christ and its...

I can’t remember the last time I read much about hell—the topic of a symposium in this issue—but those of us who recite the creed...