Latest Articles
Inauthentic but valid
In Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong James W. Loewen tells us that he encountered a marker at the Little Bighorn River battlefield in Montana dedicated to U.S....
Holiness: Sacrifice (Mark 8:31-38)
If you have denied your “self,” the cross you take up isn’t exactly yours.
Debating homosexuality
Homosexuality and Christian Faith: Questions of Conscience for the Churches, edited by Walter Wink...
Doña Inés vs. Oblivion, by Ana Teresa Torres, translated by Gregory Rabassa
Winner of the 1998 Pegasus Prize for Literature, this novel is both a family saga and a fictionalized account of the history of Venezuela, focusing on the relentless conflict between races and clas...
The Eyes of the Heart, by Frederick Buechner
Few people listen to their lives as closely as Frederick Buechner does, and fewer can articulate so well what they hear....
Haiti in extremis: Disillusioned with democracy
When the last remnants of Operation Uphold Democracy—a UN peacekeeping force but predominantly American for much of its duration—left Haiti a few weeks ago, some observers voiced dire predictions o...
What’s going on? Faith at work: faith at work
Perhaps because I’m the very part-time priest of a very small parish, it has taken me a long time to learn the proper answer to the question, “What’s going on at your church these days?”...
Ecumenical quandary
Recently Yale Divinity School organized a conference to mark a major ecumenical event of the last decade (some would even argue, the major ecumenical event of the last century)....
Koinonia’s search for community: Can its vision be restored?
Under a quartz-blue sky last October, a procession made its way from Habitat for Humanity’s international headquarters in Americus, Georgia, to a modern gray one-story building a few blocks away....
Holiness: Baptism: Mark 1: 9-15
Lent is about preparation. Forty days: time for catechumens to prepare for baptism. Time to be ready for what is to come at the Easter vigil....
Cross and swastika
Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust, edited by Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel...
Candid reporting
If you want to correctly interpret the news, stop assuming that the mainstream media know it all; pay attention instead to voices speaking quietly over in the corner....
Stay of execution: A moratorium on the death penalty
It took Richard Nixon, a fervent anticommunist, to begin a new era of relations with communist China, and perhaps it takes a Republican supporter of capital punishment to launch a new era of opposi...
A Christian appeal to Islam: A Coptic leader invokes the Qur’an
After years of enduring harassment and violence, Egypt’s Christians, the Copts, have seen their situation improve in recent months....
Foreign aid: Does it harm or help? Donors and clients in the developing world
Aid to Africa: So Much to Do, So Little Done, by Carol LancasterFuture Positive: International Co-operation in the 21st Century, by Michael Edwards...
At home in the spiritual marketplace: Five types of religious questers
Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion, by Wade Clark Roof...
Pope Pius XII and the Nazis: Shrewd diplomat or failed prophet?
Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, by John CornwallPius XII and the Second World War: According to the Archives of the Vatican, by Pierre Blet...
Power loss
I have just spent the last hour turning on and off light switches, standing in front of heater vents, and opening faucets....