This past summer, a friend of mine named Greg put together a mini high school reunion when he went back to Indiana to visit his parents. He hadn't seen many of his classmates in over 17 years. Needless to say, they had a riot reliving their glory days and finding out what was currently going on in everyone's life.

As the night was winding down, Greg noticed that his friend Debbie was getting teary-eyed, ...

My grandparents lived in Salem, Arkansas, which was an all-white community in the Ozark foothills. One day in the early 1960s, Grandpa was strolling across the town square on his lunch break from his job at the post office. As he walked by the bus depot, a friendly voice called out to him. …

Glancing to his left, Grandpa found himself looking into the face of a man he hadn't seen for almost ...

The first time the town of Tubingen, Germany, expelled all of its Jewish residents was in 1477. It soon became a place where anti-Jewish doctrines thrived, especially during World War II. Today, however, the Jerusalem Post reports that not only has a tiny Jewish community returned to the town, but there also exists the Tubingen Offensive Stadtmission Church (TOS). The church has grown to about 250 ...

Eight years ago, Lebanon-born Ali Elhajj came to faith in Christ while living in America. As he encountered evangelical culture, he became troubled by how deeply American Christians misunderstood Islam as well as Christianity in the Middle East.

"It really came to a head in 2006, when the Hezbollah-Israeli war happened, and there was a lot being talked about in the media and churches," Elhajj told ...

Muckraking is not gospel work. Witch-hunting is not gospel work. Shaming the outcast is not gospel work. Forgiving sin is gospel work.

— U.S. pastor, scholar, author, and poet (1932—)

Describing the difficulty of racial reconciliation, one African American church leader tells this story:

It was my third year with the ministry. I got a call from a prominent white Christian leader, asking me to go to lunch with him. As we're sitting down to eat, all of a sudden this guy starts crying.… He explained that God had blessed him—his children were healthy, he was known throughout ...

Fred Winters, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Maryville, Illinois, was shot and killed during a Sunday service on March 8, 2009, by a troubled young man. A week after the tragic event, his wife, Cindy Winters, was interviewed by Julie Chen of CBS's Early Show. When asked about her husband's alleged killer, Terry Sedlacek, Winters spoke only a message of forgiveness—a message quite fitting ...

Ghassan Thomas leads one of the few public churches that emerged [in Baghdad] after Saddam Hussein was toppled. His congregation erected a sign on their building that said "Jesus Is the Light of the World," but the church was raided by bandits who left behind a threat on a piece of cardboard. It read: "Jesus is not the light of the world, Allah is, and you have been warned." The note was signed "The ...

Psychologists have found an intriguing way to study what it is that we really like and dislike. It's called "affective priming." They print a word over a bouncing dot on a computer screen. If people's response is positive, they push any key with their left hand; if negative—any key with their right.

Too discover our deeper responses, researchers will use subliminal stimulation. They'll print ...

In the mid-1990s, Hutu extremists killed between 800,000 and 1 million people in Rwanda. Fourteen years later, the many men and women who experienced devastating loss are still trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. Some have even gone the extra mile toward being reconciled to those they once called enemies.

Consider Iphigenia Mukantabana. In 1994, her husband and five of her children ...