Feature

The Geneva Convention forbids excessive use of solitary confinement. Yet the U.S. persists in using it as punishment.

The blind kitten I adopted seemed to walk by faith instead of sight—the perfect companion to take to divinity school.

"Chemical trespass and climate change are often dealt with by two separate groups of environmentalists. I am interested in bringing these two together."

In philosophy and practice, spiritual direction suggests that the individual self is insufficient as a locus of meaning. No one can "do" spiritual direction alone.

Which view of economic inequality has greater merit, Adam Smith's or the Bible's? It's a trick question: the two are broadly the same.

"We often have the idea of the feast appearing magically from the kitchen without labor. But the participatory aspect is the most important part of the feast."

William Barber has a way of getting people arrested. Since he took charge of the NAACP in North Carolina, he's been inspiring followers—black and white—to engage in acts of civil disobedience.

Years before Brown v. Board, the North Carolina Council of Churches fought for integrated schools. Almost 75 years later, the council mobilized again for the same cause.

Rem­brandt's meditations on Jesus' face reflect momentous changes in his faith—and in how people of his time envisioned Jesus.

"What would happen," asks Carol Howard Merritt of Western Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., "if we coupled baby boomers' prophetic focus with the pragmatism of my generation? What if the church unleashed us to plant churches?"

I decided our family's Christmas would be simple and spirit-centered. Green to parenting, I defined spiritual as anything that allowed me a minute to reflect on what, beyond the laundry, mattered.

On Sundays, my mother stayed home and read the paper. Yet she insisted that we kids go to church.

Mercy Seat spends about $27,000 a year on the arts—a quarter of its annual budget. At those rates, the church is one of the better-paying gigs in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

Some post-worship-war churches revel in musical eclecticism. Others have a singular approach and sound, rendering the terms traditional and contemporary irrelevant.

If Martin Luther King Jr. had written a book exposing his personal failings, it would have been seen as undermining his cause. But Leymah Gbowee does not want to be thought of as a hero.

Miro­slav Volf believes that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. On November 3 he took that argument to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

"Terrorism is not nearly as widespread as many people feared it would be after 9/11," says Charles Kurzman.

Scholars disagree about how Jesus understood his life and mission. Countless labels have been applied to him. But everyone agrees that he existed, right?

The protesters sleeping in the cold do not claim that 99 percent of Americans agree with them. Their point is that the top 1 percent plays by different rules.