Features
Bone chapels and their strange art
In catacombs, crypts, and ossuaries, I’ve seen the ugliness of death transformed into something beautiful.
Bridging the ideological divide
It isn’t easy to lower the temperature of our political discourse. But there are people working to help us have better conversations.
Gustavo Gutiérrez accompanied God’s suffering people
The father of liberation theology endured much criticism, but he lived to see his groundbreaking work transform the church.
Can we save democracy in the United States?
I grew up in Taiwan and Argentina. Here’s what I know about authoritarianism.
Wisdom from Augustine in an election year
Our so-called Christian politics have been captivated by the liturgies of the earthly city rather than the city of God.
What does solidarity mean at the border?
It’s not about electoral politics—not when both major parties embrace the policies that are oppressing people.
Black Christians’ competing solidarities with Israelis and Palestinians
Divergent biblical interpretations and shared histories lead to different answers to the same question: Who are “the oppressed”?
Clarissa and her flowers
Reading The Hours in my husband’s hospital room, I was stunned by the novel’s incarnational imagery.
Against killing children
We have become a society of people who cannot prevent our own children from being killed in their classrooms—and who do not much mind the killing of other people’s children by weapons of war.
The most dangerous preacher in Hungary
Methodist leader Gábor Iványi is perhaps Viktor Orbán’s fiercest critic. He’s looking to Americans for solidarity.
Gods who make worlds
By definition, epic fantasy involves a world with a creator. Tad Williams’s Osten Ard is the best since Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
How can a congregation change its culture?
It helps to focus less on structure and instead envision the church as an organism.
Emily Dickinson, botanist
Before the beloved poet tended words, she tended the earth.
Djokovic against the gods
Humans crave stories that create order, whether they’re about the supreme being in the universe or the greatest tennis player in history.
Faith at the expense of freedom
Catholic integralism is not fascism. But the two have often made common cause.
The poetic space of the liturgy
What if we suspend our disbelief, collapse our ironic distance, and allow ourselves to go in?