Guest Post

New today from the Century: Interview with Vashti Murphy McKenzie, Lutheranism in the lectionary, more.

In a blog post at the Wall Street Journal, Conor Dougherty describes a video game behavior that demonstrates what Century writer Scott Paeth calls "a distaste for playing evil." According to Dougherty, gamers are finding ways to take some of the most violent games and tweak characters or characters' behavior so that they participate in the game with one notable difference--they don't kill.

New today from the Century: video games and moral formation, internal vs. external church-based advocacy, more.

New today from the Century: Dennis O'Brien on Stanley Cavell, translating the son of God, more.

New today from the Century: Philip Jenkins on contested holy ground, Julie Clawson on International Women's Day, more.

New today from the Century: Kay Lynn Northcutt on chronic illness, Bob Cornwall reviews Tom Long, more.

John F. Kennedy's famous Houston speech on church and state during the 1960 presidential campaign elicited Rick Santorum's after-the-fact disgust. Though Santorum misrepresents the speech in some ways--Kennedy didn't say anything about limiting religious institutions and leaders from speaking on public issues--he is right to find the speech theologically lame.

New today from the Century: John Buchanan on dignity and choice, David Heim on JFK's privatized religion, more.

New today from the Century: the editors on the Qur'an burning, Carol Howard Merritt on social media and spirituality, more.

In the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Christ we see that God is so for us and with us that we can no longer be defined according to death, a religion-based worthiness system or even the categories of late-stage capitalism.

New today from the Century: Katherine Willis Pershey on anxiety, Nadia Bolz-Weber's seven-word gospel, more.

New today from the Century: docetic offertory prayers, Lillian Daniel reviews James Howell, more.

New today from the Century: the long path to reconciliation, gory Passion plays, more.

Occasionally the Century editors sit down to talk with experts in magazine marketing. They sometimes tells us that we need to do more with celebrities--feature a celebrity on the cover of the magazine, for example. No, they're not pressing us to feature Brad Pitt or Lindsay Lohan. What they have in mind is featuring the celebrities of our world, that is, the celebrities of the mainline Protestant world. We usually respond: "But mainline Protestants don't really have celebrities." When the experts look doubtful, the editors look at one another. "Well, we might come up with a few living semi-celebrities--but that would take care of only two months worth of covers."

New today from the Century: Rodney Clapp praises snow, Casey Thompson's lectionary column, more.

New today from the Century: Tom Long on Christopher Hitchens, Lauren Winner reviews Elizabeth Clark, more.

Last weekend, ESPN fired an editor who posted a racially offensive headline about NBA player Jeremy Lin; the network also suspended an anchor who used the same term. And taking the Lin coverage as a starting point, SNL produced a parody mocking a media double standard: stereotypes about Asian Americans are acceptable, but stereotypes about African Americans are offensive. The Lin media storm exposes the myth of a colorblind society. As much as we want to believe in meritocracy, equality and individuality, we rely on racial assumptions to make sense of the world and those around us. In many cases, the assumptions carry real consequences.

New today from the Century: Interview with an immigration activist, art by Bertha Servín Barriga, more.

About 15 years ago I was a guest at the annual meeting of the Association of Christians Teaching Sociology. In one session a professor reported on a student's project. Taking the Century as a barometer of mainline Protestantism and Christianity Today as a barometer of evangelicalism, his student compared the respective responses to the civil rights movement. The student found that the Century was very hospitable toward the movement and that CT was critical of it. (Full disclosure: At the time of this ACTS meeting, I was working for CT.) Since ACTS is comprised largely of evangelical scholars, there was some hanging of heads in the room. Evangelicals, they agreed, had been on the wrong side of history, not to speak of the wrong side of justice.

New today from the Century: a nation of foodies, a future for congregations, more.