Features
When my dad killed God
My dad, Bill Hamilton, was a beloved divinity school professor. That all changed when God died and we got run out of town.
Is God still dead?
The legacy of 1960s radical theology
My mother said she was pro-life—and worked at Planned Parenthood
There will always be people like her, who are willing to tell the truth that life is choice.
A letter to my Black daughter after the fall of Roe
Your body is not a public domain.
When abortion is mere abstraction
What’s missing from the debate is the wisdom of first-hand experience.
Where our deep sadness and the world’s deep hunger meet
Sometimes vocation springs not from joy but from trauma and grief.
What I left out of my mother’s funeral sermon
I told the truth about her but not the whole truth.
Black men I’ve mourned
I’ve preached more than 800 funeral sermons. Many of these deaths have marked me.
Preaching in the valley of actual death
My task at funerals is to share the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Fantasy and reality after Roe
One can imagine an anti-abortion politics that started with economic solidarity or righteous fury at male sexual license. But the thought experiment only demonstrates its own absurdity.
Feeling US history
School districts and legislatures aren’t just challenging textbooks and curricula. They’re challenging feelings.
The spirituality of slow fashion
I have found joy reusing, recycling, and repairing clothing.
Embracing Marc Chagall’s refugee Christ
The painter’s Exodus calls to mind the Passover, the Shoah, Ukraine, and the southern border.
Title 42’s disastrous—and illegal—legacy at the southern border
The Biden administration has reversed Trump’s rhetoric around migrants but not all of his policies.
This is my broken body
When illness took over my life, I developed a new understanding of the Eucharist.
Was my father right to embrace predestination?
If we take the doctrine seriously, then we dare not draw the circle of salvation along religious lines. Or any lines at all.
The old “distraction” slur against advocates for justice
This line of attack goes back to the White Christian opponents of the 19th-century abolition movement.
The bones of Jacques Marquette
The Jesuit explorer was a friend to Native Americans. At last, he’s going home.
Death’s vision
As my father was dying, I saw God’s radiant face more clearly.
The unexpected gift of missional friendship
I was a United Methodist pastor. He was a campus minister with Cru.