Latest Articles
The millstone (Mark 9:38-50)
Eternal punishment. Like it or not, it is a biblical concept, albeit a late-blooming one....
Stain of sanctimony
The Human Stain, by Philip RothThe Day After: A Retrospective on Religious Dissent in the Presidential Crisis, by Gabriel J. Fackre...
Faith Beyond Reason, by C. Stephen Evans
The mall food court tables are close together. You can't help but overhear the two teens at the next table....
Observing Lieberman: Religious practice in public
A few days before the 1988 election that sent him to the U.S. Senate from Connecticut, Joseph Lieberman heard an encouraging story from one of his friends....
Aguacate revisited: Tracing two missing Americans
Aguacate, the Honduran base built by the Reagan administration for the Nicaraguan contras in the early 1980s, faded from the limelight in 1988 when the contras and Sandinistas signed a cease-fire a...
Community radio: Democratizing the airwaves
Since Congress and the Federal Communication Commission deregulated broadcasting in the early 1980s, control of radio and TV stations has moved steadily into a handful of multinational corporations...
Seeking justice in Rwanda
Number of wars in Europe in the past ten years: 4Number of wars in Africa in the past ten years: 15...
Pastoral learning at Bellevue Hospital: A seminarian's apprenticeship
At the end of my first year at General Theological Seminary, in New York City, I spent eight weeks in clinical pastoral education at Bellevue Hospital....
Geographies of memory
It just didn’t seem right, reflecting on my father’s life and death in the midst of a city where neither of us had spent much time....
Circumstantial evidence
Every half century or so the Christian Century moves its offices. As our old Dearborn Street neighborhood seems to be “going condo,” we moved to Michigan Avenue last autumn....
Counting diamonds: Mark 9:30-37
The Roman custom of lifting a newborn infant probably underlies Jesus’s symbolic action in Mark 9.
Uncommon sense: Sunday, September 17 (Mark 8:27-38)
Often Jesus’s words seem perversely contrary to sense....
The unanchored self
The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, by Pico Iyer ...
Inventing the "Great Awakening," by Frank Lambert
A lot of parties have put a lot of stake in the Great Awakening, the wave of religious enthusiasm which swept up and down the colonial seaboard in the early 1740s....
The Pacifist Option, by Alexander Webster
In the ecumenical conversation on war and peace, the voice of Orthodox Christianity has too often gone underrepresented....
Runaway Slaves, by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger
Until fairly recently, scholars have not known very much about the everyday lives of enslaved African Americans....
Authority figures: Resolving ecclesial issues
There’s an old bumper sticker with the words “Question authority.” To which the proper response, of course, is: “Says who?” As that reply suggests, suspicion of authority, however well advised, doe...
Oberammergau 2000: The passion revised
The Passion Play at Oberammergau is a vast spectacle that can be viewed at many levels....