Like many teenagers in burgeoning evangelical-emergent Christian churches at the end of the nineties, I loved Christian contemporary music (CCM, as it goes). Jars of Clay, Third Day, Newsboys, The Benjamin Gate, Bleach, dc Talk: hearing their familiar melodies never fails to bring a mixture of nostalgia and… well, embarrassment. My current pretentious music-snob self (as some of my friends have affectionately called me) scoffs at my former musical sensibilities. Yet I can’t deny that their…

Last December, I had the opportunity to attend the Parliament of the World's Religions in Melbourne, Australia. The Parliament seeks to promote harmony, reconciliation, and understanding in the world through both intra-religious and interreligious dialogue. In short, it sustains a collective hope that religion will truly be a purveyor of peace and not a conduit for violence and fundamental extremism in its various forms. Yet hope, at times, seems lost in the fog of recent wars, namely the…