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Today, it can be argued, a different type of prophetic witness is emerging that is perhaps as radical and countercultural as those of the 1960s, given the current polarized climate. It asks people to consider how to be good global citizens amid pluralism—a pluralism that includes fundamentalists and atheists.

Beasts is a transcendental film that enables the viewer to swim through a child’s memories, witness a hurricane and flood, watch a man die, see a home vanish. But is the imagery too transcendent and romantic?

It goes almost without saying that mainline Protestantism is in an extended period of at least numerical, if not spiritual, decline, and many commentators have taken the occasion of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church—still an important symbol of normative American religiosity—to mark the beginning of the End Times for liberal Christianity and perhaps religion in general. Others have strained mightily to see glimmers of hope even in the confusion and controversy that swirls such gatherings. We of course have no idea how it will all play out.

A Sweet Valley High primer on liberal Christianity.

As the AIDS crisis progressed and believers interrogated their faith, journalists reported their questions: Was God a God of love or judgment? Were biblical injunctions against homosexuality cultural artifacts or eternal truths?

On July 2, still glowing from the national media spotlight, Personhood USA issued a press release, “Personhood Leaders Suffer Violent Attacks From Pro-Abortion Terrorists Following Newsweek Feature,” with photos and description of shattered front-door glass, spray-painted coat hangers and “F— You” with a backward F across the front of their Denver-suburb house. The release said the Newsweek profile led to physical threats and the posting of the Masons’ home address in comments—and implicated The Daily Beast’s “notoriously liberal” readers and “pro-choice criminals” in the alleged vandalism.

Tourist buses are fixtures on Capitol Hill, but the arrival at the Methodist Building of “Nuns on the Bus: Nuns Drive for Faith, Family and Fairness” in noonday heat to the cheers of their colleagues had to be a first.

It its efforts to support the Palestinian cause, the Kairos USA statement cherrypicks from the Bible and winds up in some old and discomfiting territory.

In his latest the Times’ conservative Wunderkind Ross Douthat attempts to explain the current crisis as the result of our nation’s departure from orthodoxy. An honest look at the history of orthodoxy and he might see a past rife with the sin and brutality, enforced less by faith than by coercion.

If the Episcopal Church decides to clearly articulate its intention that all aspects of participation in the life of the church—including ordained ministry—are open to transgender persons, it will be the first mainline Protestant denomination to do so.