Features

There's a subtext to lots of sermons I hear, and some I preach: Discomfort is avoidable. Here's my formula. It's the promise of all bogus religion.

The Episcopal Church was and is right to affirm same-sex marriage. Now we should be willing to face the costs.

I didn't start my day thinking about gang killings. But then a man showed up and asked about a funeral for his nephew—on Palm Sunday.

It landed on my patio in early November, a pointy-ended battleship that was more mineral than vegetable. It stayed there as the days got shorter.

Randomness is distinct from the Greek concept of chance. Conflating the two imports to science the sense that random events are gratuitous.

The fifth-grade team had been coached since the Council of Trent by Mr. Torrens, whose idea of offense consisted of one utterly useless play.

Esther's story would be infuriating if it wasn't so over-the-top ridiculous.

Iglesia Hispana Emanuel has about 100 members. José Guillermo Salamea is teaching some 40 of them how to play an instrument.

A lack of ID caused problems for immigrants—as well as for the police who encountered them. Through a series of dialogues, a solution emerged.

British Columbia's church attendance rate is lower than Canada's, and Vancouver's is lower still. Yet vibrant things are happening in the city.

What has made this experiment in marriage and ministry work, both for the congregation and for us?

Brian McLaren, Sara Miles, Chris Wiman, and others make their selections.

America is living stormy Monday while the pulpit is preaching happy Sunday. Can we recover a blues sensibility?

Could the Spirit's love be poured into the hearts of people untouched by the incarnation? Could non-Christians be lovers of the only God there is?

The Upper Salween Valley is an inhospitable, sparsely populated place. It may seem like an unlikely place for a Christian community to thrive.

Christians didn’t baptize Aldo Leopold’s land ethic after the fact. They got there years before his work.

A memoir becomes explicitly Christian when it derives its literary power from the power of the gospel. It doesn't preach, it shows.

The death penalty is undergoing a welcome decline in the U.S. But the policy that's replacing it isn't much better.

A recent Templeton Foundation program sought to cultivate local conversation on science and faith. We asked some pastors to describe their experience.