I am a Bostonian. I was born here, have lived here my whole life excepting a few excursions, and with those interludes behind me, I intend to stay here. Boston is my home.

On Monday, April 15, Patriots' Day here in Massachusetts, when the Boston Marathon was in full swing,...

Well the Grammy's have come and gone, leaving us with that same cacophony of yays and nays about the state of popular music that we hear each year.

Pop music is trash!

Remember when musicians actually were musicians!

-or-

We're in the midst of a pop renaissance!

Well, it's December, time for the requisite warring on Christmas, shopping like it's the end of the world -- although, this year it could have been -- and making lists. Oh, the lists! There are Christmas lists and shopping lists and good lists and naughty lists and of course, my...

The most inflammatory voices are always the loudest; this is a fact of our contemporary media landscape. Threaten to picket at the funeral of innocent children killed in cold blood and you'll make national headlines. Suggest that these killings were the result of expelling God from the public school system,...

At the end of my 2004 faith crisis, when I realized that I didn't want to be identified as evangelical, I felt lost. Nobody likes to be labeled, but it's scary to not know where you belong.

It was around this time that I began visiting the local Episcopal church,...

I get Rick Santorum's beef with higher education. When he calls President Obama a snob for wanting to make higher education a possibility for all people or when he rants about the liberal professors who try indoctrinate students, I get where he's coming from. I went to a Christian college...

Yesterday, it happened. A student hit me with the question that many educators dread, "When are we ever going to use this in life?"

I love this question. I don't dread it at all. I eat it up.

I had just shown my freshman composition class part two of the...

Election seasons are prime for considering the relationship between religion and politics -- Kennedy's Catholicism, born-again Carter, Bush and the evangelical vote, Obama's pastor problem, and so on. But few campaigns in recent memory bring about as much hand wringing over religion as the current contest for the Republican nomination.

There are two thoughts swirling around and around in my head today -- two seemingly opposing view points, voices from members of my generation who see the world as it is and call foul. The first voice belongs to Thomas Day, an Iraq war veteran and graduate student at the...

As another summer comes to a close, so too does another music festival season. The fans are left only with memories of bodies packed tightly together before a glimmering stage, rock gods screaming into microphones the words they've so longed to hear, new friends made in sprawling autograph lines and...

Nine years ago, in 2002, I got on a bus bound for New York City to take part in a protest against the Iraq war. About a year before I had found pacifism, and that transformative experience was, by then, starting to manifest itself in my life in myriad ways....

Osama Bin Laden was killed last night. My wife and I were just about to go to bed when one last cursory glance at Facebook and Twitter told me the news. We turned on the television in time to see President Obama finishing his speech, and then it was back...

Last Thursday was a bad day. Two powerful blasts of bad news damn near knocked me off my feet, coming as they did within minutes of each other. Two deaths, and an unfortunate connection.

A good friend of mine from high school passed away Wednesday night. We haven't had much...

When I was a kid I knew The World was going to Hell in a hand basket. I didn't know what that phrase meant, still don't really, but I knew that it was one of the only times I could get away with saying hell, because it wasn't swearing. The...

A few weeks ago, the religion website Patheos.com featured a conversation on the "Future of Evangelicalism." The discussion was the sixth in their series on the future of religion, which had already considered two other branches of Christianity, Catholicism and Mainline Protestantism, in addition to Hinduism,...

So much of the way we talk about religion and science in the West is about reconciliation. Some great injustice has torn the two asunder, and the debate rages on between those who think they should meet again on a level playing field, and those who say they should remain...