Cover Story

As chief spokesperson for the One Campaign, U2 rock star Bono asks fans not for money, but for a personal commitment to taking a stand against poverty. The campaign, founded by Bread for the World, CROP, World Vision and other organizations, has 2 million U.S. members.

One Sunday morning in 1960, the Episcopal pastor of a 2,500-member parish in suburban Los Angeles told his congregation that he and 70 other members had been “speaking in tongues."At the end of the service, an assistant priest pulled off his vestments and stalked out, saying, “I can no longer work with this man!” Tumult reigned. One man stood on a chair, shouting, “Throw out the damn tongue-speakers!”

When I asked my friend about his work as an associate pastor, he ripped into his senior minister: “He won’t communicate! He doesn’t even seem interested in what I do at his church!” When I spoke with a senior pastor, he sighed. “Sometimes with my staff I feel like my dad did during a long car trip. When we kids would get rambunctious, he’d take just so much before turning around to give us a good whack.”

Christians, who confess that their God is the “Maker of heaven and earth” and the “Creator of all things visible and invisible,” support what looks for all the world like intelligent design. Christians have always brushed aside the notion that the world is a random concatenation of miscellaneous atoms thrown together by no one in particular and serving no purpose other than their own survival. The first article of the Christian creed could not be clearer: the world exists by the will of God. What less conservative Christians are not committed to is the idea that intelligent design excludes the possibility of evolution.

As a kid in Missouri, I was a Baptist. In Missouri that meant not only that I belonged to an important church but that I was on the right side of the great eternal divide, ready to defend my salvation against the other contenders around me. When my family moved to Arizona, Baptists were perceived differently: we were the tail end of white evangelizers who hoped to bring faith and education to the Native American and Mexican laborer population. In southern California, our next stop, people thought we were from Texas and thought of us as one more exotic breed on the Pacific shores.

Commentators in the media have often invoked the term biblical to describe the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, which has gone beyond our imagination and our explanatory categories. The term has not been used with any precision—it seems to mean simply vast or awe-inspiring.What would it mean to view the catastrophe in genuinely biblical terms? Four biblical themes inform my own pondering.

Cramming more than 50 high school students into a small room for a Bible study is challenging, but getting them to talk about sex is not. When the hand of one 15-year-old boy shot up in the back of the room, I braced myself. “Is masturbation a sin?—I really gotta know.” I was proud of him—using a word like sin is hard for a teenager.

Ten years ago Rebecca Chopp described how women’s voices and feminist practices were transforming theological education and the church. Women, she said, were “doing saving work.” At a time when the diversity of feminist theology defies tidy definitions and agreed-upon agendas, “doing saving work” suggests what’s afoot in feminist theology today—bold reinterpretations of Christianity that seek to renew the life of the church and its witness to the world.

Osteen preaches "your best life ever" to 30,000 faithful at his church in Houston. He talks about his elegant home, his well-adjusted kids and his wife—his adoring "partner in ministry." "Be positive," says Osteen, "and you too can have all of these things."

At age eight, Sam became totally paralyzed. A year later he emerged with brain damage, learning disabilities, complex emotional problems and severe behavioral problems. His family began to disintegrate under the strain. His mother committed suicide, and Sam was placed in a psychiatric hospital. In this horrible situation, what earthly difference can Jesus make?

In The End of Poverty, Jeffrey D. Sachs convincingly depicts world poverty as a manageable problem and presents a plausible and nearly painless plan for dealing with it. His optimism may be somewhat misplaced, but his hopeful, simple prescription is powerful.