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December 15, 2021

Volume 138, Issue #25

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Features

Periodical gifts

This Christmas, CC staff members are giving people print subscriptions.

Critical Essay

The creative resistance of Native American Christian art

The Christian Thunderbird is once more taking flight.

by Matthew J. Milliner

First Person

The Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey taught me how to pray again

So why didn’t I want to introduce my Methodist congregants to them?

by Jason Byassee

’Tis the season for royal Christmas movies

What exactly is it about the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that says “tiara romance”?

by Catherine Hervey

The Rittenhouse verdict and the twisting of natural law

If a protest for equal rights is a threatening provocation, then answering that threat with violence is merely self-defense.

by Gunnar Gundersen

Books

An American teenager in Slovakia

How a year overseas unraveled and remade Sarah Hinlicky Wilson’s identity

by Owen V. Johnson

15 London children died in a World War II attack

Francis Spufford’s novel imagines the lives they might otherwise have led.

by Kaitlyn Lindgren-Hansen

The complicated Lindbergh

It’s hard to strike the right balance in a biography of the heroic aviator and antisemitic activist. Christopher Gehrz succeeds brilliantly.

by Grant Wacker

The White Iowans and Latino and African migrants of the meatpacking industry

Kristy Nabhan-Warren’s ethnographic study complicates familiar views of the Corn Belt.

by Rob Kraft

Departments

First Words

Reckoning with our messiah complexes

The vulnerability of the newborn Christ challenges our inclination to play God.

by Peter W. Marty

On Art

Six Equals One, by James Quentin Young

James Quentin Young is best known for his assemblage work, repurposing found objects, discards, and metal scraps. The mix of rust, color fields, design, and form most often meet for Young in the cruciform shape....

art selection and comment by Lil Copan

Climate change’s threat to Christianity

Faith is growing in the tropics. So are the temperatures and the tides.

by Philip Jenkins

Faith Matters

Imagining a new political economy with Miriam of Nazareth

Abortion is about real lives enmeshed in the realities of home and work and wages and debt.

by Debra Dean Murphy

From the Editors

American democracy can’t survive without federal election reform

The party in Trump’s thrall is going after the very notion of fair elections. Yet Congress has failed to act.

News

Judge tosses convictions in killing of Malcolm X

More than half a century after the assassination of Malcolm X, two of his convicted killers were exonerated after decades of doubt about who was responsible for the civil rights icon’s death....

by Michael R. Sisak and Jennifer Peltz

New study examines how COVID has changed churches

A new study from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research provides a look at the state of churches in the wake of the ongoing pandemic....

by Adelle M. Banks

Women in Argentina claim labor exploitation by Opus Dei

Lucía Giménez still suffers pain in her knees from the years she spent scrubbing floors in the men’s bathroom at the Opus Dei residence in Buenos Aires for hours without pay....

by Débora Rey

Video of UM church incident goes viral, causes fallout

Canceled worship services. Closed Facebook accounts. Extra security at churches....

by Sam Hodges

In Catholic Italy, ‘de-baptism’ is gaining popularity

Like most of his fellow Italians, Mattia Nanetti, 25, from the northern city of Bologna, grew up with the teachings and sacraments of the Catholic Church in parochial school....

by Sara Badilini

People

William Sterling Cary dies at 94

William Sterling Cary, a pioneering minister and civil rights activist who was the first Black person in prominent church leadership roles, including president of the National Council of Churches, has died, according to family members....

by Sophia Tareen

People

Marvin Olasky resigns from World magazine

Marvin Olasky, the longtime editor in chief of World, a magazine that has long aimed to pair a conservative Christian viewpoint with careful, detailed reporting, resigned on November 1, effective January 31....

by Bob Smietana