Christians have long found spiritual meaning in running. But the church has held this sort of personal experience at arm's length—until recently.
I used to read Ephesians 4 and get that vague, warm glow we Mennonites feel when we see the word peace. Now the passage stops me cold.
The miracle of love is that the more you love, the more alive you are. Keeping Christmas is believing in the transforming power of love.
As Francis sees it, the joy of the gospel is rooted in an experience of God's love in Jesus. And this gospel gets people involved in the world's messiness.
As we unpack the same ornaments, read the same stories and entertain the same deep thoughts our ancestors did, we have every reason to be gloriously unoriginal.
For decades, Western human rights groups sounded the alarm about East Timor. Rarely did they note the religious dimension.
Twelve Years a Slave pulls no punches. As a white southerner, I found myself objecting that it couldn't have been as bad as this all the time. But these horrors happened, and we have yet to face them squarely.
John Updike: The Collected Stories, edited by Christopher Carduff
To read John Updike is to remember just how upper-middle-class and masculine his fictional universe is.
Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish, by David Rakoff
It's easy to write off David Rakoff's novel in verse as a cliché. But Rakoff was master enough of his craft that his rhymes lapse into doggerel only when he chooses.
Warrior God
How are we to reconcile the Old Testament's violence with the gospel? Jerome Creach's book is among the best of a recent stream of books on the topic.