Lutheran Sociologist Alvin Schmidt has published a new book on the lively topic of death and burial. “This book documents today’s rising rates of cremation in the West, and notes that these rates now include many deceased Christians, a stark contrast to Christians in the past who had consistently rejected cremation from their earliest years […]
The essence and art of spiritual memoir serves as a kind of reality check for our own, less literary lives of faith. The art of memoir imaginatively reprises the language and experiences of ordinary Christians and their communities—prayer, testimony, praise, confession, doubt, and lament. When Dorothy Day begins The Long Loneliness by evoking the smell […]
From the website FiveThirtyEight, this in-depth article includes no overt faith content but may be useful for discussing the validity of science and the difficulty of research. Research fraud and research journals have been receiving some deserved bad press. “Science Isn’t Broken” acknowledges this while offering some perspective and may be useful for examining topics […]
The September 2015 edition of Comment examines how health is not just the province of the hospital, or even the health-care industry. Just as nurses and doctors and patients are dependent on the architect, engineers, and plant managers, so the health-care industry is dependent on homes, families, churches, and schools to cultivate a healthy citizenry […]
The Chinese Christian school movement doesn’t officially exist, and parents make great sacrifices to join it—but it’s growing quickly. Unlike the missionary-started Christian schools in China’s past, this time local Chinese are understanding the need for Christian education and seeking to provide it for the next generation. This on-site article includes an overview of the […]
“God and Politics: Four Famous Voices on Religion and Society” is a brief overview of Dorothy Day (1897-1980), a Catholic social activist and a candidate for sainthood, Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), a philosopher, rabbi and physician, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), a Protestant theologian and champion of “Christian Realism,” and Stephen Wise (1874-1949), a prominent, politically active rabbi. Possible […]
In this open letter to NY Times columnist David Brooks, widely read author and developmental psychologist Thomas Lickona disagrees with Brooks’ view that Christians should drop the same-sex marriage fight and focus instead on aiding the underprivileged. Lickona points out the the two concerns are linked in several important ways. The article is a good […]
Christianity Today as well as GetReligion have both recently run articles that caution against nuisance and advocacy websites that post or pass along bogus news claims. The concern is that Christians who are to be “wise as serpents, innocent as doves” end up lapsing on both counts. The topic may be useful for courses in […]
Teachers at four Catholic high schools, under pressure from the San Francisco archbishop to adhere to church teaching in their personal lives, narrowly voted to accept a union agreement with the archdiocese for the next three years. While the contract does not describe the teachers as “ministers,” a term that would have allowed the archdiocese to […]
“The Coddling of the American Mind” is an in-depth article on the college excesses of zero tolerance, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and the threat of reprisals from the U.S. Dept. of Education. “In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for […]
