Feature

In response to our request for essays on song, we received many compelling reflections. Here is a selection.

The Totentatz window was created soon after the Shoah but with no reference to the city's murdered Jews. Two of them were my grandparents.

We asked college and seminary professors to write about one of their favorites.

"Academics tend to think reaching a broader audience means dumbing things down. It has to do instead with the ability to dramatize."

The college is closing, and I'm the chaplain.

"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."

The Upper Salween Valley is an inhospitable, sparsely populated place. It may seem like an unlikely place for a Christian community to thrive.

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.

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 if someone released all our e-mails and texts? It would make the Ashley Madison hack look quaint in comparison.

When I was baptized at 12, I refused what Baptists call “the right hand of fellowship.” I wanted the water but not the fellowship.

One day, as I considered my routine of pills and naps and exercises, I saw that it is not unlike praying the hours.

Christians didn’t baptize Aldo Leopold’s land ethic after the fact. They got there years before his work.

A memoir becomes explicitly Christian when it derives its literary power from the power of the gospel. It doesn't preach, it shows.

I knew life was a gift to be shared, not a possession to safeguard, even before my wife collapsed on the kitchen floor. But it was abstract knowledge then.

How should we Disciples make GA work going forward? I don't know the answer. I do know that we are obligated to one another only by our relationships.

Every win in our organization's history has come when a diverse group of Baltimoreans got out of their lanes and worked together.

I told her she was upsetting people with her message of accusation and fear. She responded by telling someone nearby that they were going to hell.

Sacramentality is the breath of Christian life—life that springs from the sacraments and life that yearns to return to them.

As the climb of upward mobility has grown steeper, our rags-to-riches entertainments have grown more garish, random, and humiliating.