Features
The Christmas of Baby Tommy
The gift of words
Microbes in the manger
Music for the apocalypse
Can scientists make a universe from nothing?
Gustavo Gutiérrez accompanied God’s suffering people
The most dangerous preacher in Hungary
Voices
Rachel Mann
Festival of the child
At Christmas, the least grown-up parts of us have free rein.
Heidi Neumark
Advent in the squatters’ camp
As a human rights worker during Argentina’s Dirty War, I learned to read the signs.
Jonathan Tran
Keep swinging for the fences
My decades of church life have been full of the stuff one might expect from a place that promises God and only sometimes delivers.
Isaac S. Villegas
Divine silence
A Quaker colleague taught me how stillness exercises agency, how it acts upon worshipers.
Debie Thomas
Ancestral blessings
I attended a talk by a pastor who begins services by asking, “Who do you bring into worship with you?”
Brian Bantum
Stretched between life’s verses
The future is scary: we simply don’t know, and it flies toward us anyway.
Books
What is poetry in the face of war?
Mosab Abu Toha’s poems are about Gaza. Reading them I saw all people who suffer.
Eight homilies for practicing presence
Rabbi Sharon Brous believes we can build beloved community simply by showing up for one another.
Evangelical reckonings
Randall Balmer, David Gushee, and Tim Alberta diagnose what’s gone wrong.
What if your plants could hear you?
Science writer Zoë Schlanger investigates the edges of botany research—and uncovers deep philosophical questions.
What White Christians did to Black Charlotte
Greg Jarrell explores how one congregation in his city took advantage of racist urban renewal policies.
Re-enchanting reading
Craig Tichelkamp asks whether our best hope for restoring a culture of reading might lie centuries in the past.
A fictional reservation that feels real
Amy Frykholm’s novel creates a fascinating interplay of Native people and settlers whose lives are complicated by intergenerational trauma.
Departments
The grace of apocalyptic imagination
Sheer vulnerability
