Guest Post

New today from the Century: When people don't show up, what a congregation is for, more.

My church's adult Sunday school class ended up doing a six-week study of one of John Ortberg’s inspirational and easy-to-read books. A member of the class loved the book and wanted to share and teach it—and who can argue with six weeks off as a teacher? Before that, we’d been through many of N.T. Wright’s “For Everyone” study guides, and we'd organized a successful unit on Islam and Christianity, taught well by an instructor from our county college. We’ve read Adam Hamilton; we've added online conversation to our Lenten study. Now what?

New today from the Century: Orthodoxy in East Africa, why to read Moby-Dick, more.

New today from the Century: An interfaith choir in Bosnia, remembering Doc Watson, more.

Anyone who likes maps, religion and useful or odd bits of data will have fun poking around the website created by the Association of Religion Data Archives, which now includes information from the 2010 census. The site allows for all kinds of searches by denomination and region. For example, the curious can find out what U.S. counties have the highest or lowest percentage of Episcopalians.

New today from the Century: Sex ed at school and at church, mapping religion data, more.

New today from the Century: Review of Marilynne Robinson, the Cubs and theological hope, more.

There's a danger in making veterans into secular saints. The saints don’t need us to give their deaths meaning; they died fully rewarded.

New today from the Century: Decoration Day, notes from the farm, more.

I once went on a blind date. He was a law student, a friend of a friend, and I was a seminarian. We met for drinks. He was nice, funny. He was a self-identifying Christian--the first one, actually, I had ever gone out with. We were talking about our chosen professions; he was, as many are, fascinated by the idea of a call to ministry. My call story is not exactly dramatic, but it has a social justice edge, forged on youth group mission trips and in researching poverty. “I want to make the world a better place,” I told the date. The future lawyer looked at me and asked, “But isn’t the world a fallen place?”

New today from the Century: Holy small talk, fighting for the world, more.

New today from the Century: CO2 and the extinction of species, Brian Doyle on Terry Tempest Williams, more.

New today from the Century: The lure of Jonestown, the Super PACs agree to sling strictly nonreligious mud, more.

New today from the Century: The politics of Israeli archaeology, the trouble with requiring churches to interview a female candidate, more.

New today (and yesterday) from the Century: Misconceptions about the spiritual-but-not-religious, the editors on why eliminating food deserts isn't enough, more.

In a recent interview with the Century, Michelle Alexander, the civil rights lawyer and author of The New Jim Crow, wonders about the stigma in many churches attached to people who have been recently released from prisons. “The deep irony,” she says,” is that the very folks who ought to be the most sensitive to the demonization of the ‘despised,’ the prisoners, have been complicit and silent.” But the kinds of conversations that Alexander’s book seems to demand are very difficult to have--in churches and outside them.

New today from the Century: Norman Wirzba on eating in ignorance, Patricia Appelbaum reviews the new book on Howard Thurman, more.

New today from the Century: Will Willimon on being bishop, John Buchanan on baseball, more.