Faith Matters

This is the third time I've said goodbye to a congregation. I should know how by now, but I'm still overwhelmed by the emotional awkwardness.

Are faith and doubt opposites? Thérèse of Lisieux and Virginia Woolf are part of the same history.

Sick people long to be touched—the very thing loved ones tend to avoid. In today's mechanized medicine, doctors keep their distance as well.

Neuroscientist Kenneth Hayworth is opposed to death, and he thinks he has a solution.

The newlyweds stood in worship surrounded by examples of the options for how their marriage will end. And 100 percent of marriages do end.

Photographer Noel Vicentini captured the end of the Shaker paradise, Eden going to seed. He seemed especially interested in places of joining.

I recently learned that "Onward Christian Soldiers" can speak truth—when it's not a display of militarism but just patently ridiculous.

Rites that include prostration make a striking impression. It's not often that one sees a fellow human in an act of total self-surrender.

Dhini didn’t ask to be adopted. That's the way grace works.

Dhini didn’t ask to be adopted. That's the way grace works.

Faith, as Marcelo learns in Franciso X. Stork's young-adult novel, is following the music when we don't hear it.

The 1939 World's Fair's vision was whipped to a froth through wishful thinking. Church leaders should probe the future with more humility.

I dreamed of meeting Adam in heaven. He wasn't hard to recognize; he looked like my great-uncle Harold, with the weight of his years melted off.

In the fellowship hall, theology becomes incarnational and takes on all the fleshly concerns brought to church that day.

During spring break I made a pilgrimage. With my husband and my daughter, I traced the path Virginia Woolf took through Italy in 1908.

A Swiss bureaucrat saved hundreds from the Nazis. Yet even when picking up a cross means picking up a rubber stamp, many desert and flee.

Palestinian parents don’t fret about drugs or drunk drivers. They worry that the Israeli soldiers will use their M-16s.

As a graduate student, my father visited the Abbey of Gethsemani. His experiences there entered him in some permanent way.

Salvation requires repentance. But of what do the righteous repent?

Christopher Hitchens was an unrelenting unbeliever to the end. But Ross Douthat claims that everything about Hitchens points to an embrace of life and a refusal to give in to despair.