David Heim
High-minded argument
Several high-profile editors resigned at the New Republic magazine last week after owner Chris Hughes announced he was moving the magazine toward becoming a “vertically integrated digital media company.”
For many observers, the rebellion signaled not only the demise of TNR but the inevitable eclipse of thoughtful journalism at the hands of media gurus like Hughes, who purportedly value only the number of links clicked and webpages viewed.
Right-brained apologetics: Writer Francis Spufford
“There needs to be a reason before the reasons began why you’d engage with an argument about God at all. This, I think, is where it makes sense to speak in the language of experience, of emotion.”
The court after Hobby Lobby: Religious freedom expert Brent Walker
“Many religious liberty accommodations will have absolutely no effect on the rights of third parties. Those are easier cases.”
An Irish cross
The Irish film Calvary, directed by John Michael McDonagh, is one of the most satisfying portrayals of Christianity and Christian ministry I’ve seen in a long time....
Sisters and neighbors
Representations of Christian life that are sympathetic, plausible, and interesting are rare enough in popular media to deserve notice. That’s one reason to be a fan of the British series Call the Midwife, now in its third season on public television.
Left-handed generosity
“When you give alms,” says Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, “do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret wi...
Varieties of Zionism
In a booklet titled Zionism Unsettled, a group of Presbyterians has issued a blanket denunciation of Zionism, terming the Jewish quest for a homeland in the ancient land of Israel inherently racist, exclusionary, and devastating for non-Jewish inhabitants.
Jewish and Christian groups have rightly criticized the booklet for its sledgehammer one-sided approach, theologically and politically.
Letter to Guantanamo
Not many people would think of being pen pals with a terrorist. But Rory Green, a Christian who lives in Nottingham, England, did. After reading about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whom the U.S. government believes masterminded the 9/11 attacks, Green wrote him a letter.
Animated stories
StoryCorps has for ten years been producing an oral history of America, recording the voices of everyday people telling about their families, jobs, trials and relationships....
Mandela and fighting evil
Though Nelson Mandela reportedly was guarded about his own religious convictions, he maintained close ties to church leaders and was deeply shaped by his Methodist education. When he talked of forgiving his jailers, called for racial enemies to live in peace, and in words and deeds opened up the path to national reconciliation, the echoes of the gospel were unmistakable.
Yet it should also be remembered that Mandela at one time embraced the use of violence as part of the resistance to apartheid.
The great “nonetheless”
Some people can’t get enough of Christmas carols. I can’t get enough of Advent hymns. “Prepare the Royal Highway,” “Creator of the Stars of Night, “On Jordan’s Banks the Baptist’s Cry,” “People, Look East,” “Comfort, Comfort, Now My People,” “Fling Wide the Door,” “Unexpected and Mysterious”—there just aren’t enough Advent Sundays to sing all the great ones.
I came across a commentary that said, “Advent is the hardest of times for Christians,” because it calls us to “embrace the darkness and the silence and the cold” rather than enjoy the warm glow of Christmas.
But Advent seems to me the easiest season for faith, because it’s the most truthful.
The witness of sinners: Theologian Jennifer McBride on the nontriumphal church
"It is by being in solidarity with sinners that Jesus brings about reconciliation. This is not a picture of Jesus that churches often emphasize."
World of wonders
The other day on St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis embraced a man suffering from a disfiguring disease called neurofibromatosis, which causes tumors to grow all over the skin. The pope’s action had a stunning, parable-like clarity, evoking Gospel stories of Jesus reaching out to the sick and marginalized.
An ecumenical mind
Jeffrey Gros, one of the liveliest and most penetrating ecumenical thinkers I ever encountered, died earlier this month. A conversation with Jeff was always illuminating as well as a bit disorienting, for he had the many voices of global Christianity freshly cataloged in his brain.
Roll Jordan, roll—sort of
The Friends of the Earth Middle East scored a victory this summer when some 9 million cubic meters of fresh water per year started flowing into the Jordan River.
Same labels, different Protestants
The reevaluation of liberal Protestantism and its real but perhaps overstated decline—a topic that the Century has covered with this review, and related commentary by Martin Marty and by John Buchanan—was picked up by the New York Times this week.
The Times story does a decent job summarizing the debate, in which the overarching question is posed by historian David Hollinger (interviewed by the Century last year): Did liberal Protestants of midcentury win the culture war but lose the church?
Ignorant but interested
If Americans of a certain age know anything about Puritanism, it is probably because they read something by the (atheist) historian Edmund S. Morgan, the great Yale scholar who died July 8. His book The Puritan Dilemma—which used the life of John Winthrop to describe the Puritans’ religious and political project in America—was widely assigned in high schools and colleges.
I had the good fortune decades ago to take a graduate class from Morgan on American colonial history.
Layers of faith
In the ancient city of Laodicea in western Turkey, site of the church reprimanded in the book of Revelation for being “neither cold nor hot,” our guide led us across the old agora to a p...