Latest Articles
The birth of religious studies
The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education, by D.G. Hart...
The Market Economy and Christian Ethics, by Peter H. Sedgwick
Peter Sedgwick has provided a fine service in reviewing a vast number of sources related to economic life today, though the title of his book should have been Consumption, Work and Human Identi...
Salvation at Stake, by Brad S. Gregory
Martyrdom appears so utterly alien to our time because postmodern theorists have reduced the truth claims of Western Christianity to private opinion, making any reference to ultimate truth unbeliev...
Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust, by Victoria J. Barnett
On a wall of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., is a quotation from Israeli historian Yahuda Bauer: "Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator....
Paul: A Novel, by Walter Wangerin Jr.
The uneasy genre of biblical fiction often includes what Flannery O’Connor called the “shoddy religious novel,” filled with shallow characters and plot structures as clichéd and melodramatic as 195...
A simple solution
When a friend of mine was invited to a retirement party, he responded, “Sorry, can’t make it. I am going to be climbing a mountain in Kenya....
Mexico's political earthquake: A stunning defeat for the PRI
It’s like the Berlin Wall falling down,” said one Mexican official about his country’s July 2 election. “But the PRI lasted longer than the wall.” A lot longer....
Decorum in Denver: At the Episcopal convention
By some gracious irony, the death of Robert Runcie came while the U.S. Episcopal Church’s General Convention was in session....
Sacred and shared: The future of the Columbia River
What do a Catholic bishop, a Nez Perce tribal elder, a wildlife biologist, a flyfishing surgeon and a commercial fisherman have in common?...
Unanswered questions: The King assassination
On June 9 the Justice Department reported on its 21-month investigation into the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, concluding that U.S....
Are we 'bowling alone'—and does it matter? The decline of civic engagement: BowlingAlone: The Collapse and Revival ofAmerican Community.By RobertD. Putnam. Simon & Schuster, 544 pp., $26.00.
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert D. Putnam. Simon & Schuster, 544 pp., $26.00....
Will success spoil evangelicalism? Changes that come with prosperity: Changes that come with prosperity
We’re in the Money!” announces the cover of Christianity Today (June 12). “How Did Evangelicals Get So Wealthy, and What Has It Done to Us?” the subhead asks. Michael S....
Holy Land narrativesof lament and hope: Probing Palestinian-Israeli relations
Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, by Meron BenvenistiTheEnd of the Peace Process: Oslo and After, by Edward Said...
Soul food (1 Kings 19:4-8; John 6:35, 41-51)
In the face of existential threat, God comes with the grace which is the courage to be.
Hungry for more: Sunday, August 6 Exodus 16:2-4,9-15; John 6:24-35
As Jesus speaks and acts in John’s Gospel, the people hear him at one level while he seeks to move them to a deeper level....
Praying in tongues
I first heard the Lord’s Prayer in Mexico, during a family trip when I was 11 years old....
A potent brew
Like red wine, which we biblical literalists are commanded to take now and then, coffee, unanticipated in the scriptures, offers both an enhancement of and a threat to health....
Faithworks, by Jim Wallis
In the preface to this book, Bill Moyers says that Jim Wallis is hard to "put into a box and label." Though Wallis, the editor of Sojourners, presents the gospel of individual piety, he is...