"Therefore, because you impose heavy rent on the poor and exact a tribute of grain from them, though you have built houses of well-hewn stone, yet you will not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, yet you will not drink...

It has been said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who think there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't. The person who said this was making the point that things (and people) are always more complex than they may...

Psychologists have long recognized that for most of us there is a creative "sweet spot," or (perhaps more accurately) a "sweet zone," somewhere on the continuum between a complete lack of stress and disabling distress. Most of us need the variety of inputs life brings, including experiences of dissonance and...

For some time now, and throughout this election season, a sort of economic and political rhetoric has grown up around the country. This rhetoric belongs exclusively neither to the Republican nor to the Democratic Party, and, indeed, has "liberal," "conservative" and "libertarian" supporters. Its variants are many. The premises of...

Some years ago while I was serving as dean of another theological school a controversy arose that has helped clarify some core educational issues for me. A member of that Board of Trustees with a distinguished record in the upper...

Our old professor would enter the classroom like a phantom from another age. His black master's gown billowed behind him as he came through the door, the North Atlantic wind whipping across the quadrangle of King's College and into our drafty ground-floor classroom. Halfway through his lecture, what with his...

One of the best ways to dismiss the ideas of others, without ever having to think about them, is to label them as quickly as they are uttered.

C. S. Lewis, in his classic satire of demonic possession, "The...

Several journalists, scholars, and politicians have been looking at the proportion of Americans behind bars, how we got here, and what we might do about it.

Martha Teichner presented a story on this subject on CBS Sunday Morning, titled "The Cost of a Nation of Incarceration" (April 22,...