“Trunk or treats” are happening in church parking lots across the country in an attempt to make #Halloween rituals safer and less scary. On upholding the macabre lineage of All Hallows’ Eve — and welcoming both the risks and rewards of neighborliness.

As Christians enter Holy Week, a reflection on the drama of the Easter story through poetry, music, and history. Theatrical, disturbing, cathartic, and deeply necessary, the Christian encounter with the crucifixion is a reckoning with the violence of our era. And yet in resurrection there is hope and embrace.

With the beginning of Advent, a theologian challenges Christians and the rest of us to wait and watch, and to walk alongside those whose hopes have been crushed — with poesy from Seamus Heaney speaking to that truth.

How do Christians find their place within the Christmas story? A religious scholar reflects on the necessary, urgent correspondence between two traditional Christmas narratives.