Features
Israel’s dreams and nightmares: Author Yossi Klein Halevi
"In the Middle East peace process, the peace was being negotiated by secular elites who lacked the religious language of so many of their people."
China’s gospel valley: Churches thrive among the Lisu people
The Upper Salween Valley is an inhospitable, sparsely populated place. It may seem like an unlikely place for a Christian community to thrive.
The mosque next door: Getting to know our Muslim neighbors
Muslims have been in our town for a while, but the mosque is new. Last spring our church paid a call on our neighbors there.
United in suffering: Martyrdom as Christian vocation
Are the rest of us so different from our brothers and sisters in Libya or in Charleston? Are they heroes with whom we can never identify?
What Google doesn’t know: Lessons from the Ashley Madison hack
What if someone released all our e-mails and texts? It would make the Ashley Madison hack look quaint in comparison.
Books
Glass Ceilings and Dirt Floors, by Christine Firer Hinze
Hitting a glass ceiling is a metaphor for the experience professional women have of finding subtle obstacles in the way of their advancement....
How to Read the Bible, by Harvey Cox
For the Bible to belong not only to the church or the academy but to the people, a guidebook is needed. Harvey Cox provides one.
White space, black lives
After I received the request to review Kelly Brown Douglas's book, I kept seeing her main thesis displayed in the news.
Nine Essential Things I’ve Learned about Life, by Harold S. Kushner
When Kushner began his vocation as a rabbi, he soon discovered that the members of his synagogue were asking questions he had not encountered in seminary....
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an atheist. But perhaps his atheism is precisely the kind that Christians in America need.
Afterwar, by Nancy Sherman
Nancy Sherman's message is clear: society must understand the totality of human experiences of war, including their moral dimensions.
Departments
Words that count
A student I taught with recalls licking honey from Hebrew letters as a child. My own memories of religious education are less auspicious.
Screen time
A screen in a sanctuary used to be a signal that a congregation had taken a side in the worship wars. Now it's just a sign that a church is open and functioning.
The Adventist adaptation
In the 1950s, the Adventists celebrated the milestone of a million adherents, mostly in the U.S. Now they have 18 million, mostly elsewhere.
A time for change
There is a time for everything, the preacher in Ecclesiastes observed. It is now time for new leadership at the Century.
Raziel, by Richard Carson
Richard Carson lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he has observed barns collapsing under the weight of heavy snowfalls. He has reclaimed the wood from these barns and given it a second life in his work....
Loving the refugee
The wrenching dislocations of World War II were often pitilessly ignored by the world. What story will be told of our time, and of us?
News
Liberia debates amendment declaring country to be a Christian nation
Christian leaders in Liberia—including the nation’s president, who is a United Methodist—are speaking against a proposal to amend the nation’s constitution to declare Liberia a Christian state....
John C. Dorhauer begins work as UCC president
John C. Dorhauer began work in Cleveland on September 1 as the United Church of Christ’s general minister and president....
Amelia Boynton Robinson, Selma march organizer, dies at 104
(The Christian Science Monitor) Amelia Boynton Robinson, one of the organizers of the first march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, died August 26 in Montgomery. She was 104....
Jimmy Carter returns to his hometown in new time of challenge
(The Christian Science Monitor) Jimmy Carter, 90, returned to his hometown of Plains, Georgia, after a recent diagnosis that cancer had spread to his brain....
Israeli settler vigilantes see attacks as route to Jewish theocracy
(The Christian Science Monitor) Clinging to a barren hillside, the Baladim outpost was little more than a solitary trailer, a farming tractor, a makeshift tent for shade, and a flock ...
Square in Rome named after Martin Luther
The Vatican has given its backing to naming a central Rome square after Martin Luther....
Southern Baptist missions to lay off up to 800 people
The Southern Baptist Convention will cut as many as 800 employees from its overseas missions agency to make up for significant shortfalls in revenue, officials announced August 27....
Faith-based campaign advocates for open, fair Internet rules
Interfaith leaders have long rallied for racial and economic justice. Now the Faithful Internet campaign is calling on America’s religious communities to fight just as hard for net neutrality....
Building relationships across racial lines
(The Christian Science Monitor) A low hum sweeps across the sanctuary, drifting above the bowed heads of huddled prayer groups, beyond the joined hands of black and white worshipers....
Lectionary
October 11, 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Psalm 22:1-15
As a second-generation Korean American, it is hard to identify stories from my past that can serve as reservoirs of understanding for my life now. “In you our ancestors trusted,” I could proclaim from those stories, “and you delivered them.”
October 4, 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Psalm 8
The psalmist is not alone in claiming that humans are only “a little lower than God.” Can it be any wonder, then, that our faith leaves a great deal of room to disagree about our power in creation?