Aristotle got it wrong. It's not the unexamined life that's not worth living, but the uncommitted life. So says the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, long-time political activist and current resident of Strafford, Vermont. His fervor for social justice as chaplain at Yale, then pastor of New York's prestigious Riverside Church, and finally president of SANE/FREEZE has made him one of the key progressive voices of recent decades. His new book Credo offers a retrospective of utterances from that very public ministry.... Read more

Few spiritual leaders have captured the imagination of the modern world like Tenzin Gyatso, better known as His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Believers consider him to be the incarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the legendary Boddhisatva of Compassion. Others know him as winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent campaign to free his homeland from Chinese occupation.... Read more

In Sue Halpern's first novel, a lay minister wonders why theologians spend so much time debating the problem of evil. In his view, humanity's "main dilemma" is not evil but "hardness." "Why is everyday life so goddamned hard?"... Read more

Peace will not became a reality until war ceases to be an abstraction. On the TV screen, it can all seem quite bloodless. Using terms like "collateral damage" to describe civilian casualties masks the horror of burning flesh and decapitated torsos. Precision-guided munitions promote the illusion that innocents are spared, but in our recent campaign in Afghanistan, more than 1000 children, women and other non-combatants were incinerated by "smart bombs," according to the Center for Defense Alternatives.... Read more