The Christian Century

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Not long ago I was driving to a meeting in an unfamiliar town on a rainy Saturday morning.

In a place where the religious other quite recently meant the invading army that killed your father, Pontanima's work is remarkable.

Like Jacob and Esau, my mother and my aunt met each other one day after 20 years of estrangement.

These are days of harsh political rhetoric. Political factions insist not only on the goodness of their own ideas but also on the dramatic failure of their opponents' ideas. We might be in Advent, but this is no season for understanding or for mutual forbearance in our civil discourse.

The war over Kosovo has ended. While it was still raging, it was justified primarily in terms of the need to protect ethnic Albanians from egregious human rights abuses by the Milosevic regime.

I saw my wife, Judy, cringe the first time she read the children's book Noah's Ark to our son, Nathanael. "A long time ago there lived a man called Noah. Noah was a good man, who trusted in God. There were also many wicked people in the world.

As the end of the millennium approaches, many Christians are preoccupied with questions that concern the end of the world. Here is one important eschatological theme on which you are unlikely to have heard a single word.