background on The Nations

In his excellent little book, A Testament of Devotion , Thomas Kelly describes the inward reality that governs the course of history: Out in front of us is the drama of men and of nations, seethi...

What shall I say of the Romans themselves, who fortify their own empire with garrisons of their own legions, nor can extend the might of their kingdom beyond these nations? But Christ’s name is extend...

The African Methodist Episcopal Church began when Richard Allen and Absalom Jones demanded an equal place in the Methodist Episcopal Church and were refused. In their preaching and teaching, jus...

In the sixteenth century, there were close to seventy wars involving the nations and states of Europe. The Danes fought the Swedes. The Poles fought the Teutonic Knights. The Ottomans fought the Venet...

The thrust of the parables is to subvert the distorted myths in which people live their lives. To understand what we mean by “living in a myth” just think of a couple of our own contemporary myths. Ta...

Now of course, none of us is perfect, and all of us fail in all kinds of ways. That is why we often protect ourselves a bit when we say things like, “Don’t look at me, or don’t look at Christians; loo...

While many world religions worship gods in temples, Israel’s claim was unique. Theirs wasn’t simply a consecrated center for worship; it was a meeting place where the Lord of the creation actually met...

Some marches are not against anyone or anything. They are marches for something or someone. Jesus. Peace. Hope. Unity. In a town where I lived for many years, a few of us organized an annual Walk of t...

What we call “nature” isn’t the same nature our great-grandparents knew. Even if they lived as far south as Baltimore, they could cut eighteen-inch blocks of ice off ponds in the winter to cool their ...

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, yo...

Crises, and pressures for change, confront individuals and their groups at all levels, ranging from single people, to teams, to businesses, to nations, to the whole world. Crises may arise from extern...

In this poem by Lord Byron, the poet re-imagines the ancient battle of Salamis, in which Xerxes, king of Persia was defeated by a Greek coalition in 480 B.C. The poem highlights how quickly the fortun...

Frederick Douglass describes how the evils of slavery and racism acts as a sap on the integrity of both our country and our faith in a God where there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free: Fello...

The first type of fool in the Bible is the character that might be called the fool proper. Folly in a fallen world is obviously partly relativistic, and we are always wise to say, “Says who?” Differen...

If you are ever in the mood to feel overwhelmed, discouraged, and downright depressed, hail a cab to the corner of Avenue of the Americas and West 44th Street in New York City. There, you’ll find the ...

Interpretive strategies have gone through cycles of strict-constructionist (or Originalism) and broad-constructionist (or Living Constitution) perspectives. Originally the procedure of interpreting th...

We cannot have true justice unless it is motivated by love, just as God’s greatest act of justice, sending Jesus to die for us, was motivated by love. Years ago, before the emancipation of slaves, Fre...

Saul of Tarsus did not intend to be a pilgrim when he set off to go from Jerusalem to Damascus. Indeed, why would any pilgrim make that journey? Pilgrims went to Jerusalem, not away from it. No: Saul,...

The United States is undergoing a marked change in its attitude toward religion, and Christians here face new challenges. When a blogger named Marc Yoder wrote about “10 Surprising Reasons Our Kids Le...

The original sin of racism in America began with a deeply flawed and demonic notion that shaped this nations development. Bad science claimed that black bodies were biologically deficient, then extrap...

Through most of history, the human population has lived a rural lifestyle, dependent on agriculture and hunting for survival. In 1800, only 3 percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas. By...

This is how adoption works—like a sacrament, that visible sign of an inner grace. It’s a thin place where we see that we are different and yet not entirely foreign to one another. We are relatives not...

In his book on the subject, Philip Yancey describes the tension he himself deals with as a Christian related to money: Many Christians have one issue that haunts them and never falls silent: for som...

In the United States and most other highly developed and industrialized nations that have been exporters of Christ’s gospel, it is generally accepted that the avoidance of suffering is a respected pri...

Sometimes great stories introduce the protagonist in the very first paragraph. In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, for example, we are immediately introduced to Pip, the central figure of the nov...

Like many popular adages, this one about all sins being equal before God is not entirely wrong. Every sin is a breach of God’s holy law. And whoever fails to keep the law in one point is guilty of bre...

On August 20 and September 5, 1977, two spacecraft named Voyager were launched. Eventually leaving the solar system and heading into deep space, they represented a revolutionary and promising breakthr...

What makes people happy? People have sought the answer to this question for thousands of years, but in the past two decades there has been an explosion of scientific research on this topic. In his pre...

On a cold January day, a forty-three-year-old man was sworn in as the chief executive of his country. By his side stood his predecessor, a famous general who, fifteen years earlier, had commanded his ...

The Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his book The Home We Build Together , points out to the reader that in scripture the description of the creation of the universe in Genesis is given a mere thirty-fou...