Faith Matters

Despite bleak forecasts, many of today’s teenagers refuse to buy the marketed temptations to despair and fear. They’ll find a way.

My student hasn’t allegorized Jane Eyre as Origen did the Bible. But she wrestles with passages until the text gives her a blessing.

Maybe this is your real prayer for others and for yourself. “Make this trial and tragedy a glimpse of your glory, a window into your world.”

In a culture that finds repentance unintelligible, impractical, or unnecessary, we are called to witness to its intelligibility, beauty, and importance.

We all live with many callings in life, and the greatest is not to be a pastor—much less to be in the right job at a particular congregation.

This Lent, add a journey story to your reading. Follow Gilgamesh to the ends of the earth or the Knights of the Round Table into the forest.

Vivaldi wrote his Magnificat for a choir of female orphans to sing for their supper. They were truly singing Mary's song.

Dante’s Divine Comedy, if we are willing to read it whole, has a deep unity. The tradition of its interpretation does not.

When did we stop taking church architecture seriously? Christians used to devote themselves to building projects that lasted over a hundred years. Not anymore.

Literary belief is always metaphorical, not actual. What about religious belief?

After two years, I visited my ailing friend. Eventually, he asked for the Eucharist—and suddenly every word mattered.

As we unpack the same ornaments, read the same stories and entertain the same deep thoughts our ancestors did, we have every reason to be gloriously unoriginal.

I recently went to parents' night at my stepsons' school. Since then, I've been thinking about the parishioners I've served over the years.

Captain Phillips emphasizes the larger story: long before they meet, the lives of the pirates and the captain are already bound together.

I have conversations with a wide variety of clergy colleagues. But they're all the same conversation: "Is it well with your soul?"

Sometimes it feels like a thick mist has descended on us, distorting communication. But then a face shines through the mist and dispels it.

The request hadn't even made the committee chair's checklist. It never does; it's just reflexive. And I've never known exactly what it means.

When a man with an AK-47 entered her school, Antoinette Tuff prayed—and convinced the man to lay his weapon down.

I asked Michael's mother what it was like to say goodbye. "Oh, it wasn't much fun," she said. Then she told me what she put in the coffin.

We don’t know which experiences specify our humanity. But the Abrahamic faiths agree that we are made of dust and ashes, a bit of clay or a mere clot.