Samuel Wells

“You’ve talked about a lot of things,” says your refiner’s fire. “Which is the one that really matters?”

John Milbank & Adrian Pabst consider Western society’s many problems and offer a prescription: virtue.

We need to study peace a lot harder than those who are studying war.

We are God’s artifacts—beautiful, incomplete, and mysterious.

Intolerance won the vote, but St. Martin's witnesses to a different reality.

It's dangerous to stress that an abuser isn't all bad. It's also accurate.

The woman looked at me with fear, pain, and trust—all things that the church has instilled in its faithful all these centuries.

Here are some projections and assumptions I face in my current context—and responses that reflect what the church I serve is called to be.

Christians fail to realize that the responsibility for rebellion against the faith lies invariably at their own door.

Pentecost offers a vision for Europe: not one megastate or one system for everything, but a model of diversity as peace.

The exiled people of Judah turned to their stories—and found the belief that God would save them as before. Centuries later, Christians did the same.

One Sunday, I invited people to talk to us pastors about whatever troubled them. So after the service, I had no one to blame but myself.

In Terry Eagleton's compelling narrative, three plotlines run concurrently: a parade of ideas from the Enlightenment to the present, a sustained argument about the role of culture, and a burlesque apologetic for Christianity.

Perhaps normal people no longer assume that church is part of what it means to be normal. Or perhaps the idea of a normal center was flawed all along.

Jesus went slowly, purposefully into the eye of the storm. Only through the storm would he find what he was looking for.

When the church stops talking about Jesus, it has nothing to say.

Imagine you're walking through a big city and you see a homeless person. You have several options.

Be humble. Think of the imagination of God that brought creation into being; there could have been nothing.

Perhaps it's only when we let go of who and what our loved one was that we can receive who they are now.

James K. A. Smith suggests that the work of Richard Rorty can be a source of renewal—even though it makes many conservative Christians shrink in horror.