Recently I changed my entire sermon on a Sunday morning. This might not sound remarkable—I hear preachers do it all the time—but it was the first time I ever did it. It was horrifying. Thank God it ...

As I was finishing Steven Waldman's book on religious liberty and a re-read of H. Richard Niebuhr's magnificent Christ and Culture, three books for review arrived at about the same time, all of them ...

Preaching at the Areopagus, they laughed at him. Only a few were converted. Evangelically speaking, Paul’s famous sermon given before the good and the great of Athens was not all that successful.

You learn a lot from the Bible. There are, first, the moral teachings: Love your neighbor, obey the Ten Commandments and so on. There are answers to the Big Questions: God exists; we are immortal; the ...

How inner transformation shapes outward proclamation. Your preaching is not God’s work. You are God’s work. I received this vision in a peculiar way. As I was minding my own business leading a ...

The word that keeps coming back is hunger. Scholars talk about it, but so do preachers and parishioners. The reason that preaching is enjoying a revival in churches where it was a dying art, say ...

For the moment, the sitcom seems to have forgotten to be funny. Or to be thoughtful. Or that I might even be watching. There aren't many television situation comedies left, and one of the last ...

A large, comfy armchair, a trinket-covered desk, and a basket of yarn are featured in Justin Zeigler’s office, with photos of family in Iowa and personal notes filling empty spaces. It’s an inviting ...