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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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Our firstborn son came into the world seven years ago with red hair, blue eyes and keen perception. We discovered this early on.
We’d be out for a walk and Jonah would start pointing and saying, “Woof, woof, woof!” (i.e., “Mama, Dada, over there, a doggie!”). We wouldn’t see a dog anywhere, but he never lost his resolve. “Woof, woof, woof!” And sure enough, six, maybe seven blocks up, off in the distance we would see it: a big black poodle, or a cream-colored golden retriever. He was right every time. We were the ones without eyes to see.
A while back I spent a good chunk of a week at a denominational pastors' retreat in the Alberta foothills just north of Calgary. One of the things we did during our worship times each day was spend some time “dwelling in the Word.” The specific text we focused on each session was Luke 7:36-50, the story where Jesus is anointed by a “sinful woman” at the home of Simon the Pharisee. It’s a scandalous story—a woman of ill repute showing up a bunch of religious elites, crashing their party with her sensuous, inappropriate display of penitence, love, and devotion.
By Ryan Dueck
A while back I spent a good chunk of a week at a denominational pastors' retreat in the Alberta foothills just north of Calgary. One of the things we did during our worship times each day was spend some time “dwelling in the Word.” The specific text we focused on each session was Luke 7:36-50, the story where Jesus is anointed by a “sinful woman” at the home of Simon the Pharisee. It’s a scandalous story—a woman of ill repute showing up a bunch of religious elites, crashing their party with her sensuous, inappropriate display of penitence, love, and devotion.
By Ryan Dueck
Until now I never appreciated the beautiful message of this week’s Old Testament passage. God’s promises to Israel—to not be drowned by water or burned by fire—make this text almost as comforting to its readers as the 23rd psalm.
For sermon-prep help, I frequently look at hymns, paintings, novels, poems, etc. Also Bach cantatas. Meinen Jesus laß ich nicht, written for the first Sunday after Epiphany, has intrigued me with its interpretation of Luke 2:41-52.
Like many pastors, I remember clearly the first sermon I ever preached. It was during my second semester of seminary, and I probably worked on it for 50 hours. Each detail was written and rewritten until I was confident I had produced the greatest theological document by a seminarian in quite some time.
Christians have always been uncomfortable with the Magnificat. Advent takes us places we would rather not go.
When I met Jonah I noticed two things: he was wracked with overwhelming guilt and very much wanted to die, and he knew the Bible.
John the Baptist is an acquired taste, like roquefort. He’s complex. He is an amalgamation of unanswered questions: Is he a zealot acting out the Exodus as a kind of political comedy sketch? Is he the leader of a rival faith community, a serious threat to the fledgeling Jesus movement? Is he a kind of Enkidu figure—a fugitive of our collective consciousness from the epic Gilgamesh—who crawls out of the wilderness, learns our ways well enough and then attempts to wrestle and pin our society to the ground, only to be admired briefly and then destroyed?
Whatever John is, he’s not easy to put on a cracker.
In the Broadway show Book of Mormon, Elder Cunningham faces a problem. In an effort to gird his loins, he rocks out the hit "Man Up."