Features
Cosmic question: God in a world explained by science
We might still pray for rain, but we can account for thunder without invoking bowling gods. Is there still a place for God?
Falling into prayer: Bede Griffith's pilgrimage and mine
What is it about Western culture that makes it so difficult to taste God? Why would we rather prove propositions than experience the holy?
Dark night of the church: Relearning the essentials
Maybe what sociologists call mainline decline is God pulling us away from external things so we can rediscover our union with God in love.
Altar politics: Sharing communion on Election Day
On Nov. 6, our church building was both a polling place and a place for worship. At some point I began to see the latter as the main event.
Books
Chaos and continuity
Luminaries praise Paula Fredriksen's Sin as gripping and magnificent. Her book on Augustine was both of these things. This one isn't.
Peter Singer and Christian Ethics, by Charles C. Camosy
Charles Camosy's task is audacious: as a Catholic moral theologian, he thoughtfully engages the work of the controversial and often condemned ethicist Peter Singer.
Departments
Saving the Soviets
Sunday Adelaja's story sounds like the start of a bad joke: "Did you hear about the African who tried to start a church in the Soviet Union?"
Outsiders bearing gifts
Christmas in the United States is such a mammoth economic phenomenon that when it comes to a crashing end on December 25 it feels like a total cultural collapse....
Faith in 2-D
It's the golden era of TV, and many shows explore moral and psychological issues with great nuance. Why not take religion as seriously?
Soul experiments
What are university churches for? Are they nostalgic relics, settings for academic rites, anomalies in uneasy relationship with schools' priorities?
The Tag Project / Executive Order 9066, by Wendy Maruyama
Executive Order 9066, issued in 1942, began a nightmare for 120,000 West Coast Japanese Americans that echoes through the generations. Those deemed of “foreign enemy ancestry” were tagged with ID numbers and put on trains to internment camps....
Safe, legal and rare
Most Americans are morally uncertain about abortion. Absolutists exist—like the defeated U.S. Senate candidates in Indiana and Missouri who would have prohibited abortion even in cases of rape—but they represent a minority view....
News
Bishop Ting dies at 97; led Chinese churches
Bishop K. H. Ting, the longtime leader of China’s official Protestant Church, died in Nanjing on November 22 at age 97. Ting drew high praise from the World Council of Churches and the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary, among others....
Priest ousted for support of women’s ordination
A long-running struggle between Catholic authorities and Roy Bourgeois over his support for ordaining women has ended with Bourgeois’s dismissal from the priesthood and his religious order, the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers....
A surge in secessionist theology
Corruption has gone too far. The righteous must break away. Hope now rests with a holy remnant that honors foundational texts.
The message sounds familiar. A church schism? No, mounting calls for secession from the United States....
Poll finds cheating wanes among high schoolers
Are American students making the grade when it comes to ethics?...
Charitable giving rose in 2011, but uncertain in 2012
The recession continued to affect how much Americans gave to charity last year, and the triple whammy of Superstorm Sandy, a national election and the looming fiscal cliff may cut how much we donate in the crucial final month of 2012, experts say....
Church faces backlash by rejecting women bishops
The Church of England plans to rush through legislation to consecrate women bishops after the surprising defeat of that proposal in November at the church’s General Synod in London....
Gay bishop 'retiring' to build bridges in D.C.
When V. Gene Robinson became the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church in 2003, it triggered shock waves and fears of schism across the worldwide Anglican Communion. Hundreds of parishes left the Episcopal Church in protest....
New Congress religiously diverse, less Protestant
Three Buddhists, a Hindu and a “none” will walk into the 113th Congress, and it’s no joke. Rather, it’s a series of firsts that reflect the growing religious diversity of the country....