Features
Holy ruins: Photographs by Lisa Beth Anderson
A long time coming: Waiting for a sign
Criminal negligence: The scourge of world hunger
Standstill in Haiti: Six months after the quake
Books
A review of Memory of Trees
Along America's highways, wooden barns used to reign, and blue or white silos stood like sentries. Today those wooden barns and silos are decaying, their wooden ribcages emerging like skeletons after years of neglect, and slowly being replaced by low steel buildings. Under this seemingly innocuous change in architecture lies a great American drama.
A review of God’s Battalions and Fighting for the Cross
There clearly has been a marked rise of interest in the Crusades since the start of the present war in Iraq--an interest spurred at least in part by President George W. Bush's talk of an American crusade against terror in the days following the 9/11 attacks. Up to this point, the renaissance in publications about the Crusades largely has been limited to works that fit squarely within traditional historical scholarship. Stark and Housley, on the other hand, provide Crusades volumes for an age in which information is targeted to distinct and splintered interest groups.
Being Hauerwas
Why would anyone want to read a theologian's memoir? The answer is not immediately self-evident. One can admire a thinker or an artist and still not be drawn to the person's life story.
Obama’s moment
When I opened this biography, I was as curious about how David Remnick would pull off a biography of a sitting president—after only one year in office—as I was about Obama himself.
Campaign couples
John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's book about the 2008 presidential campaign has people talking about the private lives of the politicians and all the scenes we didn't see during the campaign.
Departments
Doing business with Cuba
Time for poetry
Hard of listening
Prayer-haunted
Detail from Old Antonio / El Viejo Antonio
News
People
Jimmy Carter says he doubts that he would have been elected president in 1976 without the encouragement of pastor Jimmy Allen of San Antonio, Texas.
Briefly noted
As many as 1,000 people who had registered for the five-day Baptist World Congress in Honolulu were unable to attend because their visas were denied by U.S. officials, said leaders of the sponsoring Baptist World Alliance in an opening day news conference July 28.
Students seek to revive a progressive movement
The U.S. Student Christian Movement, which officially ended more than 40 years ago, will be revived at an October 8-11 meeting at Morehouse College in Atlanta.
Pension fight stirs moral issues for ELCA, publisher
YMCA rebrands itself as ‘the Y’
Tutu sets retirement plans, thanks South Africans
Methodist study finds four marks of church vitality
As the sour economy and aging buildings wreak havoc on church budgets, United Methodists are trying to get ahead of the problem and assess the health of their congregations in a bid to reverse declining fortunes.
A Muslim group quietly prays near Ground Zero
Lutherans avoid sexuality clash for now
Bishop Mark S. Hanson, the outgoing president of the Lutheran World Federation, appealed to delegates at the LWF gathering in Germany to hold together and avoid splits in the face of differences over issues of sexuality.