Featured

Recovering from Heroin and Fiction
I sought freedom in drugs and novels. They couldn’t save me.
Jordan Castro
Personal History
The Workers and the Church
What happened to the Christian tradition of supporting workers’ rights?
Sohrab Ahmari
Essay
The Body She Had
If only her parents had been spared the terrible freedom of having to choose whether to have a child with a disability.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Essay
Encounters at the Southern Border
Who are the migrants seeking asylum in the United States?
Robert Donnelly
Dispatch
A Lion in Phnom Penh
An insider reckons with complicity and compromise in Cambodia’s aid industry.
J. Daniel Sims
Report

Insights

Form and Freedom
A visual artist, an architect, and a poet celebrate the freedom of coloring within the lines.
Hannah Rose Thomas
C M Howell
Malcolm Guite
Reflections
Paraguayans Don’t Read
In a dictatorship, literature nurtures freedom. In a democracy, does it matter?
Santiago Ramos
Essay
The Bible’s Story of Freedom
Scripture tells an unfinished history of liberation.
Heinrich Arnold
Bible Reflection
The Autonomy Trap
Is commitment just for suckers? A conversion story.
James R Wood
Personal History
An Exodus From China
A persecuted house church chooses to flee together as a community.
Pan Yongguang
Interview
Yearning for Freedom
Four thinkers across the centuries reckon with Christian freedom.
Augustine of Hippo
Dorothee Soelle
Hans Scholl
Oscar Romero
Reading
Taking Lifelong Vows
Poverty, chastity, and obedience bring a different kind of freedom.
Dori Moody
Essay

Web Exclusives

American Freedom and Christian Freedom
Freedom is central to American ideals and to the Christian faith, but there is danger in confusing the two.
Benjamin Crosby
Essay
The Open Road
I went on a roadtrip down Route 66 looking for freedom.
Christina Cannon
Dispatch
Disciplines for Freedom
A doctor learning how to die of cancer finds guides in Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Pedro Arrupe.
Bill Gardner
Reflections
We Are All Fiddlers on the Roof
Sixty years on, what can a classic musical teach us about tradition?
Joy Marie Clarkson
Bad Faith or Perfect Freedom
Sartre and Augustine reflect on what it takes to be free.
King-Ho Leung
Essay
Jane Eyre Holds Her Own
Charlotte Bronte’s character still has much to teach us about free will.
Karen Swallow Prior

Arts & Letters

An American Mother Forgives
In American Mother, Diane Foley recounts her journey to forgive her son’s killers.
Sharla Moody
Editors’ Picks
I Cheerfully Refuse Despair
In Leif Enger’s novel I Cheerfully Refuse, one man fights against despair (and wrongdoers) in a post-apocalyptic world.
Joy Marie Clarkson
Editors’ Picks
The Glory of God Is a Human Being Fully Alive
In Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times, Elizabeth Oldfield uses the seven deadly sins to point towards the seven heavenly virtues.
Elizabeth Wainwright
Editors’ Picks
And Is It Not Enough?
The poet relishes the beauty of autumn, but sees the stripping away that comes with it.
Malcolm Guite
Poetry
Arvo Pärt’s Journey
In this excerpt from Between Two Sounds, we see the moment when the Estonian composer begins to run afoul of the Soviet regime.
Joonas Sildre
Reading