Editor's Desk

Christians need to support the cause of a Palestinian state that will live peacefully beside Israel—and at the same time reach out to our Jewish neighbors in friendship and love and shared commitment to the common good.

For Jesus, unity among his disciples is an instrument of the evangel itself. Presbyterians have a great evangelical opportunity to show a fractured world that it is possible for people to disagree and yet remain in fellowship.

I confess that I'm not up to forgiving Osama bin Laden. But I'm not going to dance in the street over his death either.

When the great theologian Karl Barth was charged with being a universalist, he reportedly denied it, but then quoted 1 John: "Christ died for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world."

If we're following Jesus, we can't spend our lives in Galilee. We can't hide behind the popular myth that religion and politics don't mix.

On Ash Wednesday, Illinois governor Pat Quinn signed a bill banning capital punishment. A member of my congregation offers a powerful Lenten lesson for the year the death penalty was abolished in Illinois.

When I was six weeks into my student pastorate, I had been to exactly one funeral—when I was seven years old. But suddenly Johnny Johnson died, I was a pastor, and Pearl Johnson collapsed in my arms.

"Are we witnessing the death of America's denominations?" asks Russell D. Moore, pointing out that people tend to choose a church based mostly on the nursery or the music. This is not new information.

It is helpful to identify the formative moments in one's life.

The birth of Jesus contradicts the idea of a God who "lay above the earth like a layer of icy cirrus." The birth means that we encounter God, not only in elegant theology but in work and in our enjoyment of beauty, friendship and love—in love particularly.

I've recently read and I highly recommend the following four books. Each is different and satisfying. Each is hefty, which is satisfying in its own way—it always feels like something of a statement to travel with a hardback book that's hard to fit into an airplane carry-on bag.

I don't know what I'm going to do without Context: Martin E. Marty on Religion and Culture. Earlier this year Marty and the Claretians, who have published Context 12 times a year, announced that it was closing down. I've been in a mild depression ever since.

Following the attacks of 9/11, the congregation I serve became aware that though it has a longstanding relationship with a nearby synagogue, it has had no ongoing connection with Muslims.

Carlyle Marney said that each of us is like a house, with a living room where we entertain and a dark basement where we store the trash. And each house has a balcony with all the people who have influenced and inspired us. The way to celebrate All Saints Day, he said, is to step out onto the front lawn and salute the people on your balcony. One of my balcony people died recently.

I used to sit on the front porch with my grandmother, otherwise the gentlest, most unconditionally loving person in my young life, while she regaled me with stories about what was going on under the dome of the Roman Catholic cathedral one block away. They're storing guns in the basement, Grandma assured me, and I imagined that the windows in the dome were gunports through which "they" planned to fire on the rest of the city.