How can a congregation change its culture?
It helps to focus less on structure and instead envision the church as an organism.
How we care for dead bodies—or don’t
Cody Sanders and Mikeal Parsons yearn for a better theology around death, dying, and the body.
Karl Barth’s affair with Charlotte von Kirschbaum wasn’t the only major conflict behind his theology
Christiane Tietz explores them all in the first full-length biography since Eberhard Busch’s in 1976.
The books we’re giving as Christmas gifts
If your secret Santa were a Century editor, here’s what you might be getting.
12 things I learned when I returned to pastoral ministry
I recently did a stint as an interim pastor. Here are a dozen things I learned—or relearned—about pastoral ministry:...
Which new books deserve a spot under the Christmas tree?
We asked our contributing editors to each pick two.
Remembering Eugene Peterson the pastor
Gene was deeply rooted in scripture and in a Christ-centered spirituality.
The call to moral resistance
Trump isn’t Hitler. Still, the Confessing Church models how we might respond to the new president.
A violent sorting out: Middle East expert Joshua Landis
"What's going on is a nation-building process. It's similar to what happened at the end of World War I, when major empires were destroyed."
Taking the measure of the culture wars
Many conservatives think advocating for unborn life is a continuation of the civil rights movement. Many liberals believe they’re carrying on the legacy of the civil rights movement in the struggle for LGBT equality. These two issues have been the hot-button issues of the culture wars for several decades now. It seems to me that we are now getting a sense of how those wars are playing out.
Child abuse and war
Almost every day our local paper carries one or more articles about someone being charged with or convicted of sexual molestation. The victims are usually children or youth....
Episcopal misconduct?
Two days after Christmas, Heather Elizabeth Cook, suffragan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, ...
Who's afraid of Ebola?
I imagine some of the people freaking out about Ebola consider themselves Christians. How ironic is that?...
One store, many churches: Bookseller Byron Borger
"I suppose some liturgical types don't like our Amish novels, and some evangelicals are perplexed by our Catholic stuff. But it used to be worse."