LYNDALL BERGER, at sixteen, wrote to her parents for permission to be confirmed. “Are you mad?” Sidney’s gaze was a pair of outspread arms, stopping his wife short whichever way she might turn. “Well, ...

For as many ordinations and professions of vows as I’ve witnessed, the awe of His call never fades ... Religious vows at the Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary in Summit, New Jersey (photo: Courtesy ...

“Is that wedding music I hear” was the opening line of a Top 40 gospel song a few years ago. “There’s a heavenly preparation for the celebration …,” the song goes on, adding that “The bride is adorned ...

I gaze upon the crucifix at Holy Mass, contemplating the image of Christ’s broken body, poured out for the Church, as he is truly present — his body, blood, soul and divinity — on the altar. A sense ...

If the church is the bride of Christ, then Jesus is married to both Rachel and Leah—to the church he wants and to the church he has to take. Rachel is the wife he loves and thought he was getting, but ...

"In being his bride, I am gifted a deeper sense of self, of love, of femininity – it is as if I never knew who I was until I entered my vocation and I now know myself only in Christ. It's incredible," ...

Beside the nativity manger, where baby Jesus, draped in a Palestinian keffiyeh, lay amid rocks, Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac stood at the pulpit of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem to ...

On the Monday after preaching, as I think about what all of those words are doing now that they’re out in the world, my mind wanders to a scene from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Lila. The title ...

It is not unusual for clerics to address their leaders directly. King James regularly caught hell from the pulpit. So when Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde went for the king, at the end of an ...