Rick Hamlin

"That we all may be one." We pray it almost every Sunday. The other Sunday as we were saying it, something clicked in me and I thought, "Wow. This prayer is a huge challenge for all of us Christians." Maybe especially me.

Christians come in many different...

People do tons of things on the New York subway: eat, sleep, read tabloids, gossip, watch movies, play games, work on their laptops, put on makeup (I wince every time I see this, sure some woman is going to poke out her eye). They also pray.

I...

When I look at religion in the world today I ask myself if it's part of the problem or part of the solution. The headlines can be disheartening. I have to remind myself there were saints in the past who changed the world for the good and brought peace. John...

If you want to know what people really care about and where they're really hurting, look to their prayers.

I wouldn't normally have privy to that information but through my involvement in a website called OurPrayer.org I see the requests for prayer on the site, people asking for...

On the morning I flew home to be at my father's bedside for the last time, I took a jog in the park. Running along the cold asphalt beneath the bare trees, I remembered walking there years before with my very pregnant wife in the same dank season....

Not long ago there was an article in The New York Times about soldiers looking to have atheist military chaplains in the armed forces. An atheist chaplain? Isn't that a contradiction in terms? And come to think of it, what does a military chaplain do anyway?

My very thoughtful 20-something son, Will, asked me the other day, "Dad, how do you pray for somebody if you don't really believe in God?"

Ouch. I know where this one was coming from, and I wanted to help, while respecting his beliefs. He's somewhere on the...

Do you bow down before you chow down?

Do you say grace before mealtime? (By grace I mean saying any prayer from any faith tradition before you eat.) Do you? Turns out this is a major indicator of your political bent, Republican or Democrat, according to authors Robert D. Putman...

I paused when I read the playwright Matthew Lopez refer to himself in The New York Times as a "foxhole Episcopalian."

Not that the expression was hard to parse but I hope he didn't say it apologetically, as in "I don't ever darken the door of a...

Evidently, Sarah Palin, or at least her minions, have been trying to take down the now-notorious map of 20 congressional districts targeting representatives to challenge in the 2010 elections. Call them crosshairs, call them surveyors' marks, but as Josh Bernoff at Adage.com has pointed out, you can't take...

'Tis the season for Christmas pageants, the boring, the brief, the touching, the sweet, the maudlin, the flawed, the ill-sung, the ill-starred, the much-photographed and the heart-wrenching after all. We can all remember cringing when some poor Joseph forgot his lines or a wise man tripped just as...

For years we've had a tradition around our Thanksgiving table. Before we dig into the meat or take that first forkful of mashed potatoes, before the stuffing and the cranberries and long before the pecan pie, we go around one by one and each person, no matter how old or...

If you want to make quick work of this article, the answer is yes. You don't have to read anymore. Done.

But why ask such a question and why even get a little wigged out over admitting to the answer? Doesn't the Lord's Prayer say, "Give us this day our...

The message came in a flurry of emails on a day that was no busier than usual. It was bad news. An old friend was letting me know that her long-time babysitter had just been diagnosed with colon cancer and was going into the hospital soon for surgery.

"Prayers!" I...