Ken Briggs

Roundtable: Decades ago, gambling was mostly occasional. Now it's a wrap-around, consuming pursuit for a much greater audience, a force that helps instill a strain of individualism without empathy.

Roundtable: Francis is a creative presence who responds to people with mixed loyalties, with priorities that don't quite fit together, and can project support for all those needing to see their ambivalence and accept it.

Roundtable: For those who care about the minds and hearts of Trump backers or look to change their votes, there are likely larger, more pervasive issues of wounded self-respect in the shadows.

Roundtable: The recent University of Notre Dame survey about abortion implies that their subjects' discomfort with abortion might be a wedge issue. But this looks like a refill of a failed cure.

Roundtable: No factor looms larger in perpetuating racism than housing bias, but it is often blurred because it is so commonly covert.

Roundtable: In this age, many Catholics aren't occupied enough by church affairs to care, or they simply walk out the door rather than push. But resistance did have an effect in a Nigerian diocese.

Roundtable: As the pandemic passes, the surge of goodwill for a better world may slow to a halt. But if enough of us submit to a greater, spiritual calling, a thorough transformation could be at hand.

Roundtable: The living spirit within us today provides for our deepest needs if we seek it and let it through our walls of fear and defensiveness. Tomorrow's crisis isn't yet here; renewal of ourselves is today's job.

Roundtable: What the conservatives want to recover has almost nothing to do with the Constitution's religious rights. Those are privileges granted by a society that deferred to them as the only spiritual game in town.

Roundtable: In the proposed separation on LGBT issues, Methodists could let one another go in peace, if not with full mutual blessings, without a seemingly impossible need to square a circle.

Commentary: Religion in America overall has become so intensely private, so enmeshed with non-religious values and so ill-defined publicly, that it's hard to tell staged religion from real religious actors.

Commentary: The pope's edgy remarks to reporters, warning about "ideology" infecting theology and saying schism could happen, indicate that the drumbeat of criticism is angering and preoccupying him.

As much of the ground crumbles beneath the churches, as sanctuaries close and members fade away, a recurring question occurs with greater urgency: Did Christianity lose its essential vitality when it won the world around it?

Commentary: When Mike Pence was announced as Taylor University's graduation speaker, opposition arose. No institution is free of division and difference, no matter how forceful the pressure for conformity.

Book review: A Disarming Spirit traces Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen's momentous and unanticipated plunge into political dissent. The author's handful of cited interviews with Hunthausen may have probed the archbishop's retrospective views of the controversy surrounding his activism, but there is no evidence of that in the book.

NCR Today: Both nonbelievers and defenders of orthodoxy — like these two New York Times columnists — have unexamined assumptions about the widening definition of "Christian."

Prospects for churches on a broad scale have become defined by accumulating data sets and quantitative analyses. But the death of a congregation affects friendships and faith journeys that have existed for decades. 

NCR Today: The Holy Spirit is the best consultant you could engage. Except there is tension and confusion about what the consultant says, including in conflicts over gay marriage and ordination.

NCR Today: The ecumenical movement has played a role in a world where faith seekers lose interest in special institutional claims and help themselves to a buffet of spiritual offerings.

NCR Today: Retreat speaker Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa's careful avoidance of details of the abuse crisis, and his virtual approval of the status quo fosters doubts about the pope's commitment to genuine reform.