The Christian Century

Every New Year's, every Easter, every anniversary of his wife's death, Samuel Johnson took stock and prayed for the grace to try again.

We church leaders need to stop fretting about our future and immerse ourselves in the baptismal waters that proclaim perfect love.

Learning a language requires us to focus our attention on something outside ourselves. It's a lot like learning to pray.

In Fra Carnevale’s Annunciation, Mary’s face signals she is pondering the angel’s message in full consciousness of the joys and terrors it will bring.

At a reunion of our seminary's class of 1965, I talked to pastors who grieve that they have not left the mainline church better than they found it. They were faithful to their moment, but that moment blew away.

My Italian is rusty. When I go to church in Rome and try to follow along, I'm reminded of Woolf's "incessant shower of innumerable atoms."

Perhaps normal people no longer assume that church is part of what it means to be normal. Or perhaps the idea of a normal center was flawed all along.

As a child, I liked to survey strangers about what it means to be human. Brandon Stanton has created a fully realized version of what I was doing.

We just took our son to college for his first year. It was hard for me, scary/exciting for him, and wounding for his mother.

A student I taught with recalls licking honey from Hebrew letters as a child. My own memories of religious education are less auspicious.

Jesus went slowly, purposefully into the eye of the storm. Only through the storm would he find what he was looking for.

Critics view genealogy as a kind of ersatz historiography, an individualistic reconstruction of the past. But there is more to family tree building.

I can still smell the wet canvas and sawdust of my father's revivals. He believed that any self-respecting revival was held in a tent.