CCblogs Network

Is the crisis whether we burn out, or how we burn out?

Preaching guru Fred Craddock, retired from Emory's Candler School of Theology, often quips: "Anyone who can't remember any farther back than his or her own birth is an orphan."

Do today's main advocates of sabbath (or “quiet,” “rest,” “time away,” whatever you call it) approach it from a spiritual-but-not-religious perspective?

The Lens at the New York Times has a fascinating collection of images entitled “Iconic Scenes, Revisited and Reimagined.” Here are famous photos, but without the thing that made them famous.

What are supply clergy? Are they merely ordained persons who are authorized to use the costume, magic words and hand motions needed to legitimize  an hour of worship while the life of the congregation goes along without them quite well, thank you very much?

I probably shouldn’t tamper with the wording of a song for the title of this post. Cee Lo Green has sparked a lot of controversy with his New Year’s Eve rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” in which he changed “no religion, too” to “all religion’s true.”

I have never found the New Year very interesting. While I enjoy the celebration of Christmas, the New Year is basically a time to hang a different calendar on the wall and to spend the first month trying to remember to write 2012 instead of 2011.

Here are this year's most popular bloggers and posts from the CCblogs network.

It's become a cliche in pastor circles. How hard the holidays are. Sometimes cliches can make the reality rather than represent it, but in this case, I do think the holidays are particularly challenging for most pastors.

Recently I wrote a piece responding to Tony Perkins’s piece at CNN in which he claims that Jesus was not an occupier, but was “a free-marketer.” Well, his piece upset me so much I’ve decided to write another response to that ludicrous claim.

It has not happened all that often, but on occasions someone has been upset enough with a sermon I've preached to call me up and complain.

Whenever I attend Catholic mass during Advent, as I did last weekend, I’m always struck by how it is simply assumed—how it’s a liturgical . . . no, an ontological given—that Christmas is nowhere yet in sight.

One of the things people say about Christianity is that Christians believe odd, impossible things. And well, they’re right. We do.