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Brief but beautiful reflection from Scot McKnight today: Christmas, if it is faithful to the original vision, is to be an event of including those who have not previously been included. It is an event that expands God’s people to others. Christmas expands peace – to all.

Few blogs, or media of any kind, have been as arresting as the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture. Alan Taylor’s blog tells captivating stories, post after post. Its big pictures offer windows into the small places we never see.  His year-end retrospective is a masterwork, something to give yourself time to gaze at and think…

All Beliefnet bloggers are offering their picks for the best books on religion in 2008. Here are my top 5: Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, by N.T. Wright I interviewed Wright about this book in the spring, and it continues to inform my thinking. I’m not always…

When I became a Christian in 1993, I became a very radical Christian. (Read all about it.) On some days back then, the only music I could find worth listening to was this odd 1970s worship legend named Keith Green. He had big bushy hair and a big bushy beard–from 1994-1999, we were basically twins–and…

Hat-tip to Nate Barksdale and Andy Crouch at Culture-Making.com for introducing me to the musician Joe Pug today. Nate calls the song “Hymn 101” one of his favorites of the last six months, and I’ll definitely be digging into the tune for the next six, and then some. There are a lot of singer-songwriters in the mold…

Former-vampire novelist Anne Rice has to be one of the most fascinating public converts to Christianity we’ve seen in a great while, not least because she is being so open about how she moved from atheism to Catholicism and, from within her changed perspective, she’s producing such interesting work. This week, Anne Rice is taking…

“Christianity…is a perpetual breeding ground for violence, abuse, superstition, war, discrimination, tyranny, and pride. Religion and spirituality is a bottomless pit breeding illusion, deceit, and oppression.”  Post your guess below. The answer appears after the jump (no peeking before you guess!). 

So asks Scot McKnight, prompted by a feisty exchange he had with Paul Raushenbush and the commenters at Raushenbush’s blog, which was prompted by Steve Waldman’s interview with Rick Warren.  The “evangelicals vs. fundamentalists” moment was the part of the Warren interview that most piqued my interest, too. I’m anxious for more conversation about the way…

As a fan of Bible retellings–songs, novels, poems, films, etc that reimagine Bible stories in some way–I was heartened by something I heard on This American Life this weekend: Jonathan Goldstein, a tAL producer and contributor and the author of Lenny Bruce is Dead, is about to release a Bible rewrite called Ladies and Gentlemen,…

During Steve Waldman’s interview with Rick Warren last week, Waldman mentioned Beliefnet’s survey of voters after the election. Among other findings, says Waldman, we learned that when asked to rank issues of concern, evangelicals who voted John McCain listed “reducing poverty” as 13th out of 14 in order of importance.  “So what’s your message to [those…
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