Faith Matters

Benedict instructed that a novice's street clothes should be kept. Every morning for the rest of his life, the monk confronted two habits.

Religious communities have long helped cultivate humanistic practices. We don't often think of ourselves in this way—but what if we did?

I asked an older English woman who left the church long ago why she now wants to come back. Her response made the color drain from my face.

This fall, C. S. Lewis's memorial stone will be unveiled in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. Poets' Corner couldn't ask for a better tour guide.

Our congregation helped build a parish school in the West Bank. In return, Palestinian Christians stretched our understanding of the gospel.

The Song of Songs is about cherishing everything that makes another human being distinctive. It's the opposite of indiscriminate violence.

When I open the sanctuary doors in the morning, I see the face of Christ in the shadow side of the welfare state.

The meeting of Benedict and Francis, characterized in the media as "potentially problematic," was in fact dramatically unproblematic.

Everyone knew the family's problems, but there was never a word of judgment or even pity. The congregation was just being the church.

Reviewers of the Piero della Francesca exhibit seem to want to hold the Renaissance painter's genius close but his religion at arm's length.

If we take the Christian story seriously, the pope's burdens are not his alone to bear. They are shared by everyone united with him in prayer.

I recently spent a night on the streets of London. I had two companions, who wondered if I was checking up on them in some way.

Social commentators warn that if you don't manage your social media identity, someone else will. I recently learned this the hard way.

The journals of Merton, Woolf and others encouraged me to see my birthday as a new beginning—and to live my 50th year as a year of jubilee.

The anxiety over Zero Dark Thirty reveals what happens when we cede the task of constructing our social narrative to the entertainment industry.

The early history of Alcoholics Anonymous has always fascinated me, so I was eager to see the much heralded new documentary Bill W.

Jack served the church in countless ways. There's only one thing he wanted in return.

What are university churches for? Are they nostalgic relics, settings for academic rites, anomalies in uneasy relationship with schools' priorities?

Prayer is not a violation of the laws of nature. It's woven into God's ongoing act of creation, as fully as the tides.

In some circles, the hope for immortality is criticized as unbiblical and sub-Christian. In others it is affirmed as empirical fact.