Features
How can a congregation change its culture?
Emily Dickinson, botanist
Djokovic against the gods
The poetic space of the liturgy
The roots of Hebrew Roots
Did God intervene to save Trump’s life?
Voices
Debie Thomas
Which church is dying?
The church of empire might be. But I’m not ready to call time of death on the mystical body of Christ.
Melissa Florer-Bixler
Women posing problems
In the gospels and in the world today, women get in the way and make the world new.
Philip Jenkins
Is religion good for human flourishing?
The Global Flourishing Study is producing a dazzling amount of data to help us answer this sort of question.
Alejandra Oliva
The midsummer of life
The season of tending and waiting can be tedious.
Yolanda Pierce
Small creatures
“There’s a frog in our house!” My daughter and I said the words together, but only one of us was excited.
Julian DeShazier
God cares nothing for our algorithms
Embracing the random can open us up to the agitations of the Holy Spirit.
Books
Written by the oppressor, sung by the oppressed
James Walvin traces a beloved American hymn on its winding journey across racial divisions through the centuries.
A novel about (not) writing an essay
Rosalind Brown’s debut novel could be understood as a midrash on Montaigne’s metaphor of the mind as runaway horse.
The strengths and limitations of Saul Alinsky’s approach
Mark Santow’s intellectual biography of the influential organizer explores how his Chicago coalitions wrestled with the challenges of race.
Debating the nature of Jesus
A thoughtful book that includes a lively conversation between New Testament scholars Bart Ehrman and Michael Bird
The puzzle at the heart of Mormonism
Historian Richard Lyman Bushman investigates his own tradition’s most mysterious miracle.
The gender phantasm
Judith Butler seeks to understand how and why the word gender has taken on such apocalyptic proportions, including among Christians.
The humanity of human smugglers
Anthropologist Jason De León charts the desperation, grief, and friendships of the Central American guías who bring migrants across borders.
What happened to US politics?
John Ganz explores the gritty political and cultural trends that erupted in the early 1990s and set the stage for the present.
Departments
A posture of hope
Empathy for the demagogue
