Are nearly 40% of clergy really about to leave the ministry? It’s a question that has come up regularly in conversations among sociologists of religion since The Barna Group, a research firm that focuses on religion, found last year that 2 in 5 Christian pastors had considered quitting full-time ministry in the past year. As director of Hartford Institute for Religion Research, I […]

It is both an underappreciated detail and a morbid irony that, as it celebrates the presidential inauguration of a man nearing his ninth decade on earth, the American Left shows more scorn than ever for the elderly and old age. Take, for instance, Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and the brother of Obama’s White House chief of staff, whom Biden named […]

Abdoulaye Konaté, born in Diré, Mali in 1953, studied painting at the Institut National des Arts in Bamako and then the Institut Supérieur des Arts, Havana, Cuba, where he lived for seven years before returning to Mali. Abdoulaye Konaté is a Malian artist who combines hanging, assembly, dyeing and sculpture to achieve high recall and strong presence in space. With […]

Are we living in a generation of fear? It’s not as simple a question as it might seem. It requires digging underneath the seemingly endless sediment of distraction and medication that frees millions of Americans every day from the task of reflection. Fear, like love, is usually only identified by its extreme manifestations, those things which we call “paranoia.” Yet […]

& Hal R. Boyd & Jason Carroll From a global pandemic and nationwide protests to a contested presidential election, this year seems tailor-made to expose America’s partisan fault lines. Those hoping for a blue or red wave to unite the country on election night were undoubtedly disappointed. What the returns revealed instead was a divided electorate. Even before the election […]

Every year, on Aug. 25, China celebrates the Qixi Festival, the nation’s equivalent of Valentine’s Day. Rooted in a mythical romance between an oxherd and weaver girl, it’s when romance blooms and gooey-eyed sweethearts exchange overpriced trinkets. Wuhan Strives To Return To Normal. But Scars From The COVID-19 Pandemic Run Deep (by Charlie Campbell/TIME) No new cases are reported in […]

From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. Acts 17:26-27 […]

As with all forms of art, we do not judge them. They judge us. Were that not so, the National Statuary Hall should be filled only with images of angels. But, alas, there are even fallen angels. “There is no one righteous, not even one…” (Romans 3:10) In the ethnic tradition of Anglo-Saxons, the “patter songs” of Gilbert and Sullivan […]

Not only are the liberal beliefs, expectations, and assumptions that require for their satisfaction permanent growth, material progress, and the removal of limits ultimately stronger than any countervailing care and concern, the care and concern (the part that may embrace nurture and restorative values) is unfortunately tied up in the quest for justice through material progress and removal of limits, […]