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I realized that she wasn't looking for my help finding a way out of officiating her friends' wedding. What she wanted was my blessing.

Shortly after my most recent move, my long-time boyfriend and I ended our relationship. The next week, I was scheduled to preach.  I'm part of a multi-pastor church, and my colleagues graciously offered to step in and preach in my place. But I was stubborn. I decided that I wanted—no, needed—to preach.

If you haven't read Justice Kagan's dissent to the Supreme Court's pro-governmental-prayer decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway, you should.

One of the most dangerous effects of physical trauma is internal bleeding....

To Robert Ferguson, Calvinist roots lead European-Americans to see all punishments meted out to humans as righteous. Yet ultimate blame for our prisons is our own.

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c. 2014 Religion News Service COLLEYVILLE, Texas (RNS) The smoke, the loud music, and the smell of perfumes trigger uncomfortable memories for Polly Wright....

A London-trained fashion designer has launched a new line of clerical wear for women in the Church of England....

Some ask why a pastor would pass up a chance to draw a young couple into the church. But perhaps that's the wrong question. 

In Jean Thompson’s novel The Year We Left Home, Anita extends an impulsive invitation to a mere acquaintance, Rhonda. Their lives have turned out very differently. Anita enjoys a contented home life with her husband and children, while Rhonda has endured an abusive boyfriend for far too long. So Anita invites Rhonda to her home, and says she can stay as long as she likes. Driving home, Anita contemplates the implications of her sudden act of hospitality.

Recently I had the opportunity to talk about Christian call and vocation with an adult education class. Normally I have this conversation with 17-21 year old people, but last weekend the crowd was a bit older, closer to retirement age. I asked them to think about what society had told them about vocation, what the church had told them and what their experience of vocation had been. The interesting thing this group said was that often vocation only became clear in retrospect. 

Journalist Eliza Griswold has been to Afghanistan (and Pakistan) numerous times since 9/11, where she discovered landays, a centuries-old form of poetry usually composed anonymously by illiterate P...

What is it called when we complete a sermon, art, poetry, song or writing, and there is a bit of our soul that takes form and shape? Wisdom takes on paint. Beauty becomes clothed in letters. Depths of emotion become suffused in photos. When something ephemeral inside of us takes on a concrete quality that can be shared. When our art lives on after we have departed. What is it called?

My student hasn’t allegorized Jane Eyre as Origen did the Bible. But she wrestles with passages until the text gives her a blessing.

Every Sunday, more people attend Assemblies of God churches in the Sao Paulo area than in all the U.S.

When I posted about evangelicals and the death penalty the other day, I didn't note Samuel Rodriguez's piece at Time. Not because he's a controversial figure, but because the piece doesn't go very far: while evangelicals should be outraged by "the details" of how Clayton Lockett died, it's clear Stephanie Neiman's killer "needed to be permanently removed from" society (an artfully ambiguous phrase). They should be outraged by these details "regardless of how you feel about the death penalty." And how does Rodriguez himself feel about it? He's studiously noncommittal, that's how. I'm noting it now because yesterday, Morgan Lee posted an article in which Rodriguez elaborates on his own piece.

Rahila Muska, a teenage girl, lived in the Helmand province of Afghanistan, a Taliban stronghold....

"The kidnapped girls were both Christian and Muslim; their only offense, it seems, was attending schoo...

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c. 2014 Religion News Service...