Lately I have been reading Michael Massing’s massive Fatal Discord, an account of the relationship between the sixteenth-century scholar Desiderius Erasmus and the reformer Martin

It is perhaps commonplace to think of life as a blur. Lent asks us to slow down, to pay attention.

Recently I heard a pastor describing his efforts to reach marginalized people in his community with the good news. He cited this story and made a startling statement: “Sometimes in order to get people to Jesus you have to mess with the structure.” These entrepreneurial men didn’t let propriety stand in their way! They messed, quite literally, with the structure.

Last summer I worked my way through a massive biography of Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII, his ill-fated son Edward VI, and, briefly, Henry’s oldest daughter, Mary.

This summer a controversy raged over the White House administration’s decision to separate children from parents at border crossings from Mexico into the United States. People were outraged that young children were incarcerated, away from their parents, in circumstances characterized by some as “prisons” and others as “concentration camps.”

I love poetry. Nearly every morning I read one or more poems to begin my day. I love the evocative images and startling metaphors. Poets have a way of bringing us up short, of making us look at an overly familiar world anew.

American church historians trace the beginning of the evangelical movement to the early ministry of Billy Graham. His evangelistic crusades were transdenominational and open to anyone open to his proclamation of the gospel. […]

There are days I would love to ignore the rest of the world—to stay off Facebook, leave the television screen blank, and toss the newspaper in the recycling bin unread. […]