Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director of the Shalom Center, listened to the preaching the Rev. Jeremiah White, the retired pastor of Chicago’s Trinity UCC Church and
Mick LaSalle is the film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. His blog is called “Maximum Strength Mick.” Here is what he says about going
Anthony Robinson of the Seattle Times expounds on the perils of believing in one’s own moral certainty.
The Wall Street Journal takes a closer look at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey of the religious landscape in the USA.
In April of 1819, right around the time that he began to suffer the first symptoms of tuberculosis — the disease that had already killed his mother and his beloved brother, Tom — the poet John Keats sat down and wrote, in a letter to his brother, George, the following question: “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?”
Over at the Christian Century blog Theolog, John Dart made an observation about the value of humor when it comes to the art of preaching and our own relationship with faith. Being able to connect with people’s ability to laugh, he says, is a gift that helps diffuse tension.
Sarah Vowell reflects on a holiday dedicated to radical love: Here’s what Dr. King got out of the Sermon on the Mount. On Nov. 17,
Americans are too darn happy, says Eric G. Wilson, who believes there is a war on melancholy. “Why are most Americans so utterly willing to have an essential part of their hearts sliced away and discarded like so much waste?” he asks. “What are we to make of this … obsession with happiness… that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse?”
Whatever we make of it, today competition dominates our ideology, shapes our cultural attitudes, and sanctifies our market economy as never before. We are living in an age that prizes competition and demeans cooperation, an era more narcissistic than the Gilded Age, more hubristic than the age of Jackson. Competition rules.
Anglicans Online asks whether the Communion is becoming like Facebook or another social networking site with people adding and deleting each other at will. The