Featured

Bring Back Hippocrates
The Hippocratic Oath has largely disappeared from modern medicine. What have we lost?
Lydia S. Dugdale
Essay
The Dance of Devotion
Lifestyle discipline in achievers is admired. Religious discipline in believers, not so much.
Kelsey Osgood
Essay
Victor Hugo’s Masterpiece of Impossibility
In Les Misérables, competing vows reveal the paradox of grace.
Caitrin Keiper
Essay
A Vow Will Keep You
For a Bruderhof pastor, a lifelong vow makes mutual faithfulness possible.
Randall Gauger
Viewpoints
A Broken but Faithful Marriage
My grandparents separated for decades. But they never broke faith with their bond.
Dori Moody
Personal History
Can Love Take Sides?
The law of love excludes no one, but requires a choice from everyone.
Wendell Berry
Essay

Insights

A Defense of Vows
Making vows is not for cowards.
GK Chesterton
Reading
The One Who Promises
The making and keeping of promises and vows seems to be something close to Taylor Swift’s heart. What can we learn from her songs?
King Ho Leung
Essay
Why I Chose Poverty
Those who, like Francis of Assisi, reject wealth and possessions find the whole world is theirs.
Andreas Knapp
Essay
Demystifying Chastity
It’s time to rediscover chastity as a virtue for everyone.
Carino Hodder
Essay
The Adventure of Obedience
It’s not popular. But obedience can transplant us to places we never expected.
Norann Voll
Essay
Vows of Baptism
In Christianity, baptism means a total transformation, as these classic church readings from Armenia, North Africa, and England show.
Reading
Hutterite Ten Points of Baptism
This teaching from sixteenth-century Moravia instructed Anabaptist believers seeking rebaptism as adults – a step that could mean a martyr’s death.
Reading
Tiny Knights
Some life lessons are best taught by King Arthur, Robin Hood, and the occasional cowboy.
Maureen Swinger
Community Snapshot

Web Exclusives

The Day No One Would Say the Nazis Were Bad
Some say relativism is on its way out on college campuses, giving way to partisan passions. This ethics professor finds it alive and well.
Mary Townsend
No Promises
Does Alcoholics Anonymous work?
Eve Tushnet
John Wayne, The Quiet Man
When John Wayne goes to Ireland in John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952), there’s no escaping the marriage rituals, for better or worse.
Hannah Long
Rich Mullins: Ragamuffin, Celebrity, Disciple
The singer-songwriter defined a generation of Christian music but sought a Christ-like response to wealth and fame.

Arts & Letters

Poem: “Blessing the Bells”
Bless the sounding bells— / The foundry and the furnace, / the partials and the pitch.
Ned Balbo
Poetry
Poem: “Autumn in Chrysalis-Time”
It’s butterfly-dying time / Leaf-grieving and thieving time / Blue wings-against-pavement time / Less praise than appraisal time…
Ned Balbo
Poetry
Editors’ Picks: What Your Food Ate
A review of David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé’s What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health
Ragan Sutterfield
Editors’ Picks
Editors’ Picks: Untrustworthy
A review of Bonnie Kristian’s “Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community”
L. M. Sacasas
Editors’ Picks
Editors’ Picks: The Last White Man
A review of Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man: A Novel
Anthony M. Barr
Editors’ Picks
The Raceless Gospel
Half a century after his death, Clarence Jordan still has much to teach America about war, wealth, race, and religion.
Starlette Thomas
Essay
Vows in Brief
How three monogamous animal couples got from courtship to “I do.”
Phil Christman
Humor