Featured

Selling Friends
In multilevel marketing, friendship is not the means to the sell – it is the thing being sold.
Clare Coffey
Essay
Enchanted Capitalism
Modern capitalism claims to be secular. It’s anything but.
Eugene McCarraher
Interview
Princess of the Vatican
What happens when a Roman palazzo becomes a homeless shelter?
Sharon Rose Christner
Essay
Leper Colony Sketches
A woman finds pain and friendship in the enforced community of outcasts at a Paraguayan leper colony.
Maria Weiss
Maureen Burn
Personal History
In Praise of Costly Magnificence
Mary of Bethany shows the beauty of extravagance.
Alastair Roberts
Essay
The Last of the Cuban Revolutionaries
What’s left of Fidel Castro’s revolution seventy years after it began?
Portfolio

Insights

The Religion of Mammon
Money and God are enemies. We must choose one or the other.
Eberhard Arnold
Essay
Pay As You Can
At a café where we grow the food and don’t name a price, we’re still learning new mindsets.
Robert Lockridge
Dispatch
Ownership and Communion
A sixteenth-century Anabaptist spells out the economics of the Apostles’ Creed.
Peter Riedemann
Reading
Saving the Commons
As the Industrial Revolution took off in Britain, William Cobbett rose in defense of the cottage economy.
Jack Bell
Essay
On Owning Twenty-Two Cars
What is it like to live in a community where you possess nothing but share everything?
Maureen Swinger
Community Snapshot
Where Your Treasure Is
Five readings from Christian thinkers challenge our assumptions about money.
Nikolai Berdyaev
Basil of Caesarea
Maria Skobtsova
CS Lewis
Dorothy Day
Reading

Web Exclusives

The Effective Samaritan: A Parable
A Tradcath, an exvangelical influencer, a mainliner, and a conservative megachurch pastor star in this retelling of Luke 10:30–37.
Phil Christman
The Justice Mothers Are Due
If soldiers deserve a pension for serving their country, mothers also deserve material support. History suggests this is a very American idea.
Erika Bachiochi
Friday Long Read
The Library at Home
My parents insisted on reserving an entire room in our small house for books. Reading expanded my world and shaped my future.
Zito Madu
Friday Long Read
Should Churches Be Beautiful?
A Christian raised in folding-chair storefront churches is uncomfortable in Rome’s glittering basilicas – until she starts to see them as God might.
Sharon Rose Christner
Friday Long Read

Arts & Letters

Poem: “Clair de lune”
Clair de lune from Claude Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque in memory of my mother.
Jean L. Kreiling
Poetry
Poem: “Advent”
It seems as though it never has to die / as long as it continues on its way.
Matthew King
Poetry
Poem: “Argument of Periapsis”
Is there sound in space? We try / saying what we really mean to say.
Midge Goldberg
Poetry
Editors’ Picks: Thin Places
The Ireland of Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places offers more than a token sense of generic mysticism.
Allison Backous Troy
Editors’ Picks
Editors’ Picks: Dinosaurs
Lydia Millet’s novel Dinosaurs points to community but remains clear-eyed about the failures of human beings to live well together.
James Smoker
Editors’ Picks
Editors’ Picks: Natality
Jennifer Banks’s spectacular book Natality considers Hannah Arendt's idea that humans “are not born in order to die but in order to begin.”
Caitrin Keiper
Editors’ Picks
History Arrives on the Island
Read the first chapter of Eugene Vodolazkin’s new novel, A History of the Island, the chronicle of an island from medieval to modern times.
Eugene Vodolazkin
Lisa C. Hayden
Fiction