In this age when the “spiritual but not religious” seem to have more relevance than churchgoers, it’s easy to wonder why church attendance matters at all. But I believe that we need common spaces, more ground ...

Martin L. Smith Reflections on the Revised Common Lectionary, Cycle C HOW SHALL WE engage with scripture thro ...

What's it like to wrestle with the Divine One? You know, like Jacob did there in the desert one night. You can contend with God, can you not? Is God not then your enemy in some way? ...

I love Peter Rollins' honesty about his dark night of the soul. He's popularized a term for the intellectual position accompanying the dark night of the soul: a/theism. I interpret Peter's thoug ...

Amy Sullivan Faith, Doubt, and Other Lines I've Crossed: Walking with the Unknown God. Jericho Books. JU ...

There aren't just messes on my kid's high chairs — they're in the Bible too. And, if we're all honest, our lives can be pretty messy too. But is that a bad thing? ...

Reentry is often a pain in my ass. It's true. I get a chance to get away from it all, to spend some time with friends and begin to unwind and it's glorious. But then there's the return trip ho ...

Some of the psalms are pure jubilation, but just as many — the “psalms of complaint” — sound like … well, like the private Mother Teresa. On Sept. 5, 1997, the world mourned when ...

As an 11-year-old boy, Don Bradley went looking for gold plates. After all, Mormon founder Joseph Smith said he was directed to a set of such plates, buried in a hill near his house in upstate New York. ...

Sometimes, to see our true faith, it has to be challenged, smacked in the face. Sometimes in pursuit of our real and true selves, which is the only soil where real and true faith can flourish, we have to face ...

It is not the imperfection or presence of conflict themselves within the Communion of the Saints that too many of those who would not call themselves Christians find repellent. It is how the church deals with ...

I'm troubled by the way many Christians choose to take definitive and certain stances about complex issues, and the rhetoric they use to state and defend these positions, rhetoric that tends to divide rat ...

In the feature-length drama Sound of My Voice, Peter Aitken, a 20-something school teacher, is angry at the cultish fanaticism that led to his mother’s death (per her cult’s teaching, she refused to take medic ...

To believe is easy. You can fill stadiums with people wanting to believe, either to solidify what they already think or to grasp hold of something because they feel cast adrift and lost at sea. To doubt, to in ...

"These holidays have their roots in miracles that took place thousands of years ago. They connect us to our past and give us strength as we face the future. And they remind us of the common thread of huma ...

Jeannie Choi David Bazan on how he became an agnostic -- and lived to sing about it. Since 1994, David Bazan h ...

Jeannie Choi Matt Hildreth Since 1994, David Bazan has put sharp questions about faith, ...