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  1. Opinion

ELCA Hits Bottom

Schism is a serious matter. Even though the leaders of the congregations that left the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) to establish the North American Lutheran Church (NALC) in 2010 considered the ELCA to be the schismatic party, having broken from the apostolic tradition, they . . . . Continue Reading »

Where Liberalism Helps

A vast oblong of Islamist, authoritarian, or sectarian persecution stretches from Egypt, Eritrea, Turkey, and Sudan, all the way to China and North Korea, across India and Pakistan. According to a recent report published by Aid to the Church in Need, “the persecution of Christians is today worse . . . . Continue Reading »

CoWo, NoGrow

Back in 1998, at a theological conference, I heard a pastor (we’ll call him Pastor V.) of my denomination (the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod) recount what had driven him out of his second call, a mission church in Lawrence, Kansas. It was the early ’90s, and Lawrence was one of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Conservatism’s Next Generation

There’s a lot of hand-wringing in Washington over the dramas of the Trump administration, not to mention the tug-of-war over congressional seats and jobs in the bureaucracy. But when this period has passed and tomorrow’s conservatives look back on it, it may seem obvious to them that these were . . . . Continue Reading »

Geoffrey Hill, Prodigal

Among poets writing in English during the last forty years, Geoffrey Hill was sometimes named the greatest one alive, but he was always named the most difficult one to read. He had come to live and teach in America in the 1980s, along with a brilliant group which included Paul Muldoon at . . . . Continue Reading »

Singing Aquinas in L.A.

When I was a child in parochial school, we began each morning with ­daily Mass. My mother worked nights, and no one in my family was an early riser. I inevitably arrived late to church. The nuns stared disapprovingly as I slipped in among my more punctual classmates in our assigned pews. This . . . . Continue Reading »

​Stardust to Stardust

I’m at the corner of Broadway and West 73rd Street trying to decide whether the security guard at the building next door dislikes me. Earlier he was giving me dirty looks when I bent down to study the sign in front of the church he is guarding. With apologies to a man who is just trying to do his . . . . Continue Reading »

Michael Novak by the Sea

Once upon a time there was a lion . . . and the lion had a voice like a lamb. The day Michael Novak died, that unbidden couplet mysteriously wrote itself into my head. Now it’s stuck there like a song that won’t go away. Maybe it lingers because I always thought of Michael as a lion, a metaphor . . . . Continue Reading »

A Disunited Methodist Church

Just as the Roman Catholic Church was shaped, in part, by the culture of the Empire, so Methodism in America was influenced by the democracy of the New World. In their beginnings, American Methodism and the United States of America created three branches of government: legislative, executive, and . . . . Continue Reading »

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