worldview and perspective on Modern Religious Life

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier...

These people always find God in the sunsets. And in walks on the beach. Sometimes I think these people never leave the beach or the mountains, what with all the communing with God they do on hilltops,...

Recently, when I was in London, I went to the National Gallery. It was a weekday, but it was still crowded with people wearing headsets, staring at famous paintings, listening to a narrator explain th...

The United States retains a basic respect for religion though it may be following European trends: surveys show a steady rise in the “nones” (now one-third of those under the age of thirty), that is, ...

Most people nowadays would not say the religious stories believers believe are actually false. (It would be impolite to put it that way and might even be considered intolerant). At the same time, thou...

So it is that in most Western industrialized countries church and society have lost their identity, religion has become more and more a private affair, and morality has become secular. This process af...

Ancient Lens What’s the historical context? Background Structure This Psalm of David is unique. “It is the only hymn in the Old Testament composed completely as a direct address to God.” [1] It e...

The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes-central role in education, that is exactly what i...

In this fictionalized pastoral counseling session, the Episcopalian Priest Robert Farrar Capon shares some eternal truths related to the nature of religion—and in conclusion, how Christianity differs....

Some of us are interested in religious studies because we are interested in people. People do religious things; they symbolize and ritualize their lives and desire to be in a community. What piqued my...

Other major world religions are still centered in the same general geographic area from which they originated except for Christianity. Even more intriguing, the center of Christian growth continues to...

Modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increa...

Religion is not, at the outset, a refuge of grace and mercy for the despondent and desperate, an enchanted stream for crushed spirits, but a raging clamorous torrent of man’s consciousness with all it...

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...

In one generation, the place of Christianity within culture dramatically shifted as we experienced what theologians and sociologists of religion call the “death of Christendom.” Christendom isn’t Chri...

The defining problem driving people out is …just how American life works in the 21st century. Contemporary American life simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is d...

Brands are the new religion.

Any religious movement which adopts a purely critical and negative attitude to culture is therefore a force of destruction and disintegration which mobilizes against it the healthiest and most constru...

Religion is not a strange or added thing; but the inspiration of the secular life, the breathing of an eternal spirit through this temporal world.

Experience shows that it is an easy thing in the midst of worldly business to lose the life and power of religion, that nothing thereof should be left but only the external form, as it were the carcas...

It’s hard to be religious when certain people are not struck by lightning.

The normal course of day-to-day human interactions locks us into patterns of feeling, thought, and action that are geared to a world set against God. Nothing but solitude can allow the development of ...

In his excellent little book, A Testament of Devotion , written almost a hundred years ago, Thomas Kelly describes the tension that all ministries must live in; the focus on this world or the wor...

It is no more narrow to claim that one religion is right than to claim that one way to think about all religions (namely that all are equal) is right.

Your religion is what you do with your solitude

I was in London browsing one of the ubiquitous British tabloids and an advertisement for a new health club grabbed my attention. The picture was of a magnificent gothic church sanctuary that had been ...

The essence of other religions is advice; Christianity is essentially news. Other religions say, “This is what you have to do in order to connect to God forever; this is how you have to live in order ...

As sensitive and broad-minded humans, we must never allow ourselves to be in any way judgmental of the religious practices of other people, even when these people clearly are raving space loons.

This is an age where our sense of spiritual possibility, transcendence, and the presence of God has been drained out. What’s left is a spiritual desert, and Christians face the temptation to accept th...

Religion fails if it cannot speak to men as they are.