A good biography, expertly researched and finely crafted, conveys not just the trajectory of someone’s life but also a feeling for the era in which the person lived. This superb telling of the “still far from finished” life of William Sloane Coffin is just such an accomplishment.
Rising Expectations: Urban Congregations, Welfare Reform, and Civic Life
My Easter Sunday sermon preparation was interrupted this year by a two-hour emergency meeting at a local housing authority, where we discussed marketing plans, reserve funds and retaining walls.
Cover Story
When Church Became Theater: The Transformation of Evangelical Church Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America
Jeanne Halgren Kilde
Ugly as Sin: Why They Changed Our Churches from Sacred Places to Meeting Spaces—and How We Can Change Them Back Again
Michael S. Rose
Building from Belief: Advance, Retreat, and Compromise in the Remaking of Catholic Church Architecture
Michael E. DeSanctis
From Meetinghouse to Megachurch: A Material and Cultural History
The phrase “family values” became an early catchword in the culture wars. The way people define those values and implement them politically marks a bitter line of division between liberals and conservatives.
Hymns are “important in the history of ideas, the formation of culture, and the inner life of individual readers,” J. R. Watson reminds us in this time when the disciplines of hymn writing and singing are undervalued by many Christian worshipers.
