With her super-sensitive sense of smell, sixteen-year-old Kaia is used to not fitting in. Add to that the pills she's becoming dependent on, the recent death of both of her parents, and having to live with an aunt with whom she has nothing in common, and Kaia is ready for a change. So when she receives an invitation from Dr. Vadim Grigori to participate in the Grigori Young Scholars Program (GYSP) with its promise that she will meet others like herself, she jumps at the chance. Her leap tu...

On the weekend of April 22, 2012 the St. Anne's Church website received thousands of visitors. That Sunday, in the New York Times Magazine, an article appeared about the Rev. Dr. Amy E. Richter competing in a physique competition. The strong reactions to the article got Richter and her husband and fellow clergyperson, the Rev. Dr. Joseph Pagano, thinking about the scandal of the Incarnation. The claim that God entered fully into our flesh-and-blood human existence makes some of us squeamis...

Matthew's Gospel contains material unique to it among the canonical Gospels. What is the background for this material? Why does the writer of Matthew's Gospel tell the story of Jesus in the way he does--including women in his genealogy, telling the story of the birth of Jesus in his particular way, and including the visit of the magi led by a star? Enoch and the Gospel of Matthew shows that the writer of Matthew was familiar with themes and traditions about the antediluvian patriarch Enoch...

A Man, A Woman, A Word of Love is a new collection of sermons by two of the finest preachers in the Episcopal Church today. They also happen to be married to each other. Beautifully written, compassionate, theologically astute, and oftentimes very funny, these sermons provide fresh insight into the inexhaustible riches of God's Word. Following the unfolding story of God's love in Scripture and tradition, Pagano and Richter lift up different dimensions of God's love celebrated in the differ...

Why worship? In this superb new collection of essays, lay people, clergy, poets, theologians, musicians, novelists, and scholars offer personal, profound, and provocative reflections on their experience of worship in The Episcopal Church. Through their flesh-and-blood stories of longing, loss, and love, we encounter the God who meets us in common prayer. Contributors to the book include: J. Neil Alexander Fred Bahnson Michael Battle Luisa Bonillas Rodney Clapp Kim Edwards Melissa Deckman F...

What words from our Christian vocabulary would you miss if you could no longer use them? If you pronounced them and no one understood? If you spoke and people gave them a meaning at odds with your conviction? What words do you fear are falling into misuse? If you could save some word or phrase from disuse or misuse what would it be? Saving Words is a collection of personal, provocative essays by lay people, clergy, poets, theologians, musicians, and scholars on words they want to preserve ...

Few institutions were as central to nineteenth-century American culture as the home. Emerging in the 1820s as a sentimental space apart from the public world of commerce and politics, the Victorian home transcended its initial association with the private lives of the white, native-born bourgeoisie to cross lines of race, ethnicity, class, and region. Throughout the nineteenth century, home was celebrated as a moral force, domesticity moved freely into the worlds of politics and reform, an...

Recognizing the railroad’s importance as both symbol and experience in Victorian America, Amy G. Richter follows women travelers onto trains and considers the consequences of their presence there.For a time, Richter argues, nineteenth-century Americans imagined the public realm as a chaotic and dangerous place full of potential, where various groups came together, collided, and influenced one another, for better or worse. The example of the American railroad reveals how, by the beg...

"Most contemporary young people operate far enough from Moses’ moral compass that it never occurs to them that “OMG” (“oh my God,” in teenspeak) has anything to do with the Ten Commandments, much less that it breaks one of them. After all, the phrase is a nearly ubiquitous adolescent throw-away line...Yet Christians should hear the phrase “oh my God” differently. Youth ministers, parents, teachers—anyone who has ever loved an adolescent—know that “OMG” can be a prayer, a plea, a petition, ...

*Read by Andy Richter, Aaron Karo, and a sleigh full of Santa’s favorite elves*“I traveled through the seven levels of the candy cane forest, past the sea of swirly-twirly gumdrops, and then I walked through the Lincoln Tunnel...”Ever since Elf hit theaters, audiences around the world have fallen in love with the story of Buddy, the charming (and oversized) “elf ” with a heart of gold. But what most people don’t know is that when t...

Envisioning a future in which the Christian church plays a viable and transformative role in shaping society, Gretta Vosper argues that if the church is to survive at all, the heart of faith must undergo a radical change. Vosper, founder of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity and a minister in Toronto, believes that what will save the church is an emphasis on just and compassionate living -- a new and wholly humanistic approach to religion. Without this reform, the church as w...

Five hundred years after Martin Luther and his Ninety-Five Theses ushered in the Reformation, bestselling author and controversial bishop and teacher John Shelby Spong delivers twelve forward-thinking theses to spark a new reformation to reinvigorate Christianity and ensure its future.At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Christianity was in crisis—a state of conflict that gave birth to the Reformation in 1517. Enduring for more than 200 years, Luther’s movement was then follo...