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Since 1900, the Christian Century has published reporting, commentary, poetry, and essays on the role of faith in a pluralistic society.
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On Good Friday we face conflicting urges, on multiple fronts.
On the one hand, I don't want to be one of the Christians who Gardner Taylor called "a Resurrection people, but not a Crucifixion people." I don't want to rescue Jesus from the cross--the weekly tendency of many preachers, and I think a poor interpretation of "bringing the good news." It is a reality: Jesus died.
We don’t talk about idolatry much anymore, despite the caution against it in everything from the Ten Commandments to the New Testament epistles. This is ironic, because idolatry flourishes in our culture.
We don’t talk about idolatry much anymore, despite the caution against it in everything from the Ten Commandments to the New Testament epistles. This is ironic, because idolatry flourishes in our culture.
As anthropologists have shown us, cohesive communities usually have narratives, traditions, and symbols that have shaped their collective psyches and have powerfully bound them together. These traditional practices make up their thought world, and when a person is displaced from that world, it makes less sense to carry on the practices.
My father grew up in a clan society in pre-Korean War North Korea. His grandfather was head of the Shin clan.
By Joyce Shin
When our collective symbols and stories no longer make sense in our reality, we question who we are. After exile and liberation, the ancient Israelites were so devastated that images of overwhelming waters and fire speak to them.
by Joyce Shin
If all it took was a star to compel a person to Bethlehem, the Magi would arrive to see a multitude.
My words feel small. Like I’m trying to beat back the ocean with a stick. I could command the waves to stop, but the sea will keep pounding the sand. Recent world events have generated a lot of fodder for preachers and writers, and yet I have nothing to say.
The tension between the joy of the first three readings and the judgment of the Baptizer’s proclamation is theologically instructive. It presses us to hold the two together.
The Totentatz window was created soon after the Shoah but with no reference to the city's murdered Jews. Two of them were my grandparents.
David Carr rereads the familiar materials of the Bible in conversation with trauma theory. This opens the way for a fresh and suggestive interpretation.
David Carr rereads the familiar materials of the Bible in conversation with trauma theory. This opens the way for a fresh and suggestive interpretation.
Aristotle writes that we would never go to the theater to see terrible things happen to a good man through no fault of his. Yet here we gather, aching for a good man’s sorrows and turning to him to make sense of our own.
by David Keck
Aristotle writes that we would never go to the theater to see terrible things happen to a good man through no fault of his. Yet here we gather, aching for a good man’s sorrows and turning to him to make sense of our own.
by David Keck
I eschew the danger of the river, but I know that it is where God leads me.
by Diane Roth
Last week we drove 350 miles to Smith College, where our daughter was singing with the glee club at Christmas Vespers. Each year at a pair of services, campus and community enter liminal space by hearing sacred music from student choral and orchestral groups, pondering poetry and biblical readings by students and faculty, and singing carols together.
This year it also became a setting to turn attention to other matters. As a Facebook event page put it, “You can’t sing carols if you can’t breathe.”
By Martha Spong
Last week we drove 350 miles to Smith College, where our daughter was singing with the glee club at Christmas Vespers. Each year at a pair of services, campus and community enter liminal space by hearing sacred music from student choral and orchestral groups, pondering poetry and biblical readings by students and faculty, and singing carols together.
This year it also became a setting to turn attention to other matters. As a Facebook event page put it, “You can’t sing carols if you can’t breathe.”
By Martha Spong
No one likes the thought of an angry God. It's hard enough to deal with an angry person.
"Remember the sabbath" is a costly commandment. Our culture’s assault on it extends far beyond Sunday.
My mother died on the winter solstice shortly after her 50th birthday. So I have spent a lot of time thinking about darkness and the return of the light.
As I read Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark, I wondered if I had fallen prey to the dualistic paradigm she finds so troubling.
It often feels like a rhetorical game, this question of what belongs to God.