religion 29

Whether the remains of St. James lie there or not, most of our band will likely return again to travel a new way to Santiago.

Grief is not a process to work through, a disorder to heal, a condition to treat, or an illness to cure.

Pastoral ministry in prison can change lives, but it doesn’t magically erase the pain of incarceration.

For the task of understanding the past demands honesty, humility, and respect for all aspects of human nature, from the material to the intellectual and volitional and—above all—the spiritual.

Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 Just So Stories are a delightful anomaly—they feel like folk tales but were largely invented by Kipling himself as bedtime stories for his eldest daughter, Josephine.

Cash may as well be situated in an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, a broken ring-giver, a pagan, who for all his good intentions, cannot heal that which infects his people and…

Without God, a spiraling fertility rate seems certain. But on spiritual grounds, there’s always room for hope and renewal. When the seed is sown on the good soil, it bears…

But I wonder: as it strains to get over Christ, will the West survive without noticing all the other beaten horses of the world? Or will it one day break…

It would be easy to dismiss my argument as a simple platitude: “Trust God.” But it is trust in the infinite that allows us to trust finite beings.

...the real artist, for both O’Connor and Ference, is one who sees and expresses gratitude for what is already there, and deals with it in such a way as to…

As the sun rises over the Nile or my daughter’s grave, it occurs to me that the ancient Egyptians may have been onto something. Jess lives on, her soul soars…

The way of the puzzler is not about reaching a certain goal. If it were, the perfectly fine image would never have been broken up to begin with. The way…

A Non-Believer Ponders Life, Death, and Staring into the Abyss

Her heart is for those little ones, that they might come to know The One who became a child for our salvation and for the glory of God.

God is perverted in our minds from a giver into an imminent enemy. He becomes the all-knowing one who alone reads our hearts’ desires and who alone, in His power,…

Rather than empowering us to live in humble confidence in relationship with others and our maker, AI offers us a choice similar to that which confronted Esau.

“They see us as deeply lonely people,” Barry told Fred, “and one of the reasons we’re lonely is that we’ve cut ourselves off from the nonhuman world and have called…

“Adonai has compassion,” sang the psalmist, “for he understands how we are made, he remembers that we are dust.” Perhaps in our dust of grief, we see clearly for the…

If an invisible world is a reality, then a creator is probable, as the deists suggest, and perhaps even plausible. God may well be really real, just as I had…

Man must face the reality of his own existence and his ultimate fate. To stare into the abyss of eternity, to examine and grasp the meaning of life, is a…

In this piece, I turn from the abstract idea of the marriage between the outer world of work and the inner world of the spirit to centers of education that…

He does not conflate attendance with salvation or sanctification. But empty pews can neither be saved nor sanctified. They never serve in the nursery or children’s services. They never teach…

Mr. McNabb recognizes the central passion of Fr. Vincent: his deep love for Christ, expressed through a severe asceticism, a total devotion to traditional Catholic doctrine and social teaching, a…

What comes out is a story of a small group of Reformed Canadian Baptists who are rural, hardworking, self-educated (largely by reading the Bible), and persistent in becoming holy, but…