Just after the clock struck 10 p.m. Tuesday in Chicago's Grant Park, and Wolf Blitzer's voice boomed across the Obama election night rally announcing that the junior senator from Illinois would, indeed,...

Rarely are we able to glimpse the big picture from our vantage point, mired in the details of the here-and-now.

But now, on the cusp of the...

Last week, a judge in Nebraska threw out a 2007 lawsuit filed against God by state Sen. Ernie Chambers, who had sought a permanent injunction against the Almighty for bringing "acts of terrorism" against the Cornhusker State.

The salad days these surely are not.

Lately, it's hard to have a sunny outlook...

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

Shortly after 1 a.m., the taxi came to a stop in the Pentagon parking lot. We climbed out and walked solemnly toward the otherworldly glow in the distance.

Two of my dear friends and fellow religion journalists, Jason and Michael, and I made the short journey from downtown...

They called her the "barefoot Madonna."

Nearly 50 years ago, when an 18-year-old Joan Baez lit up the stage at the Newport Folk Festival, she was an ethereal, earthy chanteuse who launched a revival of...

Summertime is the slow season for most churches. Pastors are faced with the perennial phenomenon of watching their congregants disappear from the pews, taking a vacation from church as well as from work and school....

Grace is, by my definition, something unexpected.

So it should have been no great surprise to me to discover a great blessing of grace in, of all places, a television program.

In its...

Editor's Note:

This is a transcript, prepared by GGHQ, of the full-length DVD recording of the Rev. Michael Pfleger's remarks at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago on May 25,...

The last time Mike Pfleger searched the classifieds for an apartment, he was a 20-something-year-old seminarian who hadn't yet taken a vow to obey his bishop.

This morning, Pfleger, the 59-year-old pastor of St....

On Sunday morning, I was enjoying a brisk walk along the Hudson River in lower Manhattan and some quiet contemplation when my cell phone rang. It was my editor.

"Mike just called, and he...

In the end, it wasn't about the sex. Or the Manolo Blahniks. Or men with nice buns, bank accounts or bubbes.

For the ladies of "Sex and the City," there...

Memorial Day this year, for me, was as conflicted as the weather on the outskirts of Chicago. Sunny and bright one hour; overcast and threatening the next.

In the last six weeks, I lost...

Doom is such a marvelous word. While not exactly onomatopoeic, it almost sounds like the emotions the word is meant to evoke.

Destruction. Apocalypse. Judgment Day.

The resonance of doom's vowel -- especially if drawn out and intoned deeply a la James Earl Jones -- echoes the...

Doom is such a marvelous word. While not exactly onomatopoeic, it almost sounds like the emotions the word is meant to evoke.

Destruction. Apocalypse. Judgment Day.

The resonance of doom's vowel -- especially if drawn...

Some conversions take a lifetime.

For the Rev. Carroll "Bud" Pickett, it took 95.

Pickett, a Presbyterian minister, was the death house chaplain at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas, where,...

My Uncle Satch was the least politically correct person I've ever known.

Racial and ethnic epithets (of all varieties) as well as George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words tripped off his tongue with cringe-worthy ease. He refused to mince words (no matter how much anyone pleaded with him to occasionally...

Three years and a few days ago, I was standing in the middle of St. Peter's Square in Vatican City, eating a cone of hazelnut gelato when smoke began to appear from the chimney atop the Sistine Chapel.

It was a little before 6 p.m., if memory serves, and...

To bless someone, in the most literal sense of the word, is to confer your hopes to them.

That's why so many traditional blessings begin with the word "may."

Take, for instance, what is perhaps the best-known Irish blessing (or toast, as the case may be this time...

Oprah Winfrey has been spiritually educating her viewers for years. Last week she began offering formal instruction to more than 700,000 students across the globe.

Before the first session of "A New Earth" -- a free, 10-week online class taught by Winfrey and Eckhart Tolle, the German-born spiritual teacher...