Thomas G. Long

The anxiety over Zero Dark Thirty reveals what happens when we cede the task of constructing our social narrative to the entertainment industry.

Prayer is not a violation of the laws of nature. It's woven into God's ongoing act of creation, as fully as the tides.

Sick people long to be touched—the very thing loved ones tend to avoid. In today's mechanized medicine, doctors keep their distance as well.

My daily reading is tethered to the rhythms of the sun. In the evening, there is the slow burn of the substantial book beside the easy chair, which I savor in small portions. Early mornings are marked by a different pattern.

I recently learned that "Onward Christian Soldiers" can speak truth—when it's not a display of militarism but just patently ridiculous.

The 1939 World's Fair's vision was whipped to a froth through wishful thinking. Church leaders should probe the future with more humility.

A Swiss bureaucrat saved hundreds from the Nazis. Yet even when picking up a cross means picking up a rubber stamp, many desert and flee.

Christopher Hitchens was an unrelenting unbeliever to the end. But Ross Douthat claims that everything about Hitchens points to an embrace of life and a refusal to give in to despair.

Everyone wants my opinion these days: airlines, hotels, Amazon. How healthy can it be to think of life as a series of episodes to rate up or down?

Men and the church are often at odds. Sadly, many of the reasons researchers give for this are as insulting as they are misguided.

Much of the snickering about boring sermons comes not because we expect so little but because we have hoped for so much. A hunger persists for a word from the Lord—without which we are left to our boring selves.

The notion that grief moves through some kind of process toward resolution owes more of a debt to American optimism than to Christian hope.

When Acts says Jesus is "taken up to heaven," this is not a spatial claim.

Instead of fretting about worship style, perhaps we should be more concerned about scale. For all its extravagance, much worship today seems curiously trivial, inward and downsized.

With surprising swiftness and dramatic results, a significant segment of American Christians has over the past 50 years abandoned previously established funeral customs in favor of an entirely new pattern of memorializing the dead. Generally included in the pattern is a brief, customized memorial service (instead of a funeral), a focus on the life of the deceased, an emphasis on joy rather than sadness, and a private disposition of the deceased.

Mark's story is about the irony of keeping our hands ritually washed while being up to our elbows in evil.

Jesus does not serve the vague “God of everybody.” He serves the scandalously particular God of Israel.