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The feet and legs of the homeless men we serve at the Bowery Mission in New York are a testimony to the pain they endure daily. Many of their legs are swollen because, like Jesus, they have nowhere to lay their head to rest.

Three times a year, a worship service ends and I go back to the vesting room to change—and I feel as though I'm walking into a time warp.

Today, I passed as straight. That’s a weird thing to write, because in fact I passed for straight for most of my life, either because I hadn’t thought yet about not being straight, or later because I *had* thought about it and just couldn’t face what it might mean for my life.

Two recent books testify to the difficult but hopeful work of forgiving in the most trying circumstances.

Past efforts at "character education" have operated with a shallow understanding of character. The Expeditionary Learning model goes deeper.

So much of the debate over Indiana’s new religious freedom law revolves around the gap between the letter of the law and the politics behind it. Supporters note that the law doesn’t mention gays and lesbians, and that similar laws (though not identical ones) have been on the books in other jurisdictions for years. Opponents point to the fact that the law’s advocates organized support for it with arguments about protecting business owners who object to being vendors for same-sex weddings. They're both right, just about different things.

In March 1933, the United States stood on the brink of ruin. Twenty-five percent of the population was unemployed; many people had not worked for several years. The situation was even worse in cities with major industries, where unemployment surpassed the national average. Yet the real worry of the era cannot be captured by statistics alone. 

I have been thinking about the wounds people carry, those unbearable weights that take their toll on our bodies and hearts.

Thomas knows Jesus as incarnate. He cannot easily make the leap to Jesus’ new condition. It’s easier for us, because we consider the story in a different order.

The driver would only take me to Mejicanos once he talked to my contact at St. Francis of Assisi's. The church is neutral territory in a bloody landscape.

When my mother died early on a spring evening in 1993, the ladies of the garden club and the bridge club gathered around my family to stand sentinel over the old-fashioned ritual of paying calls on the bereaved.

You have two choices when you feel it happening. You can let your heart stretch to the point of ripping open to the beauty and agony of living in this mortal world. Or you can pull the protective shield back over the vulnerable center.