Guest Post

Here are the Century magazine articles that got read the most online this year.

I was delighted to see Annie remade with an African American girl in the title role. But the new version doesn't do justice to the original's progressive vision.

This week, at a refurbished camp for oil and gas workers, the Department of Homeland Security officially opened a new detention center for women and children who cross the southern U.S. border. In DHS director Jeh Johnson’s view, this is a move to prevent people from crossing the border at all. He wants to stem the tide of “illegal migration,” and he believes that detention is one means to do so. “Frankly, we want to send a message that our border is not open to illegal migration, and if you come here, you should not expect to simply be released,” said Johnson. Let’s look at the positive side for a moment.

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.”

Like Simeon and Anna, I had a rough Advent.

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.

Last Saturday was a stay-at-home-and-read-a-book-with-a-cup-of-something-warm-in-your-hands sort of day. It was the kind of damp cold that goes straight to your bones and chills your toes so that they don't get warm for the rest of the day. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good parade-watching day. And yet, there we were, lined up outside the library on Church Street, umbrellas in hand, peering down the street and waiting for the sirens to indicate that the parade had started.

Last year as part of a faculty group book-read I encountered Larry Rasmussen’s Earth Honoring Faith. In Rasmussen’s view, sabbath is one of the resources that could be deployed to apply brakes to a society that is over-consuming the resources of the planet and the lives of its own members. The suggestion of the healing possibilities of sabbath resonated with me not only because of my environmental commitments, but also on a more human level.

In the wake of the grand jury’s failure to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown—and in light of conflicting eyewitness accounts of the incident—many have argued that video evidence would have helped a lot. Body-mounted cameras offer a technological solution to what is otherwise a problem of human moral complexity: eyewitnesses can’t agree; officers can’t behave; human evidence can’t be trusted. Technology, the argument suggests, can supersede all of this. And then, of course, a grand jury in New York City failed to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of another unarmed black man, Eric Garner.

What would it mean for us to be filled with the breath of God again and come to life for the sake of racial justice?

At the vigil for Ferguson, I stumbled over singing "We Shall Overcome." I have remarkably little, personally, to overcome in my life.

(The Christian Science Monitor) The first bureaucratic triumph upon our arrival in Jerusalem came at the Ministry of Interior, when a surly woman peeled off our newly minted residency visas and pressed them into our passports. “We are prisoners of thanks,” my husband and I said, mustering an antiquated Hebrew phrase of gratitude. “Bye,” she replied, with all the feeling of a desert rock.

The rewards of foster parenting are many, but that doesn’t change the fact that it, like all parenting, can be difficult and emotional work. Even those who have raised a brood of their own biological children may not be fully prepared for the circumstances of foster parenting.

From All Saints until Veterans Day, I’m posting a blog series on soldier saints at Centurions Guild. “Ten Saints, Ten Days” explores ten lives, their context, and their relevance to soldiers today. In the Bible, the number ten signifies completion and wholeness—something many soldiers today do not feel. The moral complexity of their service is too often brushed away with a quick “thank you” or an upgrade to first class. But soldiers’ experiences, their testimonies, are part and parcel to the integrity of the church—especially in this time of war. A theologically credible account of war requires the voice of soldiers, the actual bodies that participate in it.