Faith: Christian
“With the death of Thomas Merton, we lost really one of the great Catholic voices, one of the great prophetic figures within the Catholic Church. And I think that’s why his books are still selling, why they’re still being translated because that message is as relevant today as when he wrote it,” says Dr. Paul Pearson who oversees the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University. More
“I don’t see how you can have a relationship with God that doesn’t involve a state of receptivity—and a receptivity to lots of stuff, because God does show up in all kinds of odd ways.” More
How do interfaith couples decide which faith their children should adopt? “We both wanted to keep our own religions and our own identity for ourselves, so we knew from the beginning that we didn’t want our children to be just one of our faiths,” says Amy Schombs, who is Jewish and whose husband is a Christian. More
For many Christians, celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany means marking the appearance of Jesus. In Western churches, the holiday emphasizes the visit of the wise men to the baby Jesus. But Eastern Orthodox churches focus on Jesus’ baptism. More
“The ways of presenting Mary in art change as society evolves,” says exhibition curator Timothy Verdun, and the human intimacy on display in the images, he adds, “convey to people that God gave such enormous value to every aspect of human life that he chose to share it.” More
“I’ve been singing the Messiah for a long time, so it’s very familiar music to me. We do our rehearsals, and we also then reflect ourselves individually about what the music means to us,” says Kenneth E. Chadwick, a member of the Fairlington United Methodist Church choir. “The singing is an important part of my experience of my faith.” More
“East and West are not contradictory to each other. They are part of the same body,” says Metropolitan Elpidophoros, a bishop in the Greek Orthodox Church in Istanbul. “And in the last years, thank God, we have extremely good relations.” More
Depopulation in rural Canada means “we end up having buildings for which we have no future use,” says Rev. Ken Vaughan, rector of a local Anglican parish in Nova Scotia. “The primary concern was that it continue to be a church for others. Better that than simply being torn down and destroyed.” More
The new St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, set to be rebuilt at the World Trade Center, will be a national shrine and will include a nondenominational bereavement center. “Next to the place where the most tragic thing that has ever happened on American soil,” says Father Evagoras Constantinides of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, “it needs to be a place to offer, to welcome, to open, and to accept all sorts of people.” More
“I love the Lutheran tradition, the Lutheran theology, the message of grace,” says Rev. Margaret Kelly, a Lutheran pastor in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her food-truck church offers meals, prayer services, and a feeling of community to the hungry and homeless. More