Articles
- Unnecessary Gifts – Wesley Hill, The Point – Traditionally, children have been the guarantor that one will be remembered, a sense of hope for the future in old age and perhaps afterwards. For the celibate and childless, then, there was often a sense of hopelessness compounding sorrow. However, the Church’s belief about the Resurrection profoundly transforms our sense of hope and the communities knit together in Christ can make the celibate into fathers and mothers in the faith.
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In slavery, her family was owned by his. Now they attend a Baltimore church seeking to atone for its past. – Jonathan Pitts, The Baltimore Sun – The weight of wrongs done, even in the distant past, can feel overwhelming to the descendants of both. This story is about what happened when a church in Baltimore discovered that the forefathers of one of its members owned another and how those members and the church as a whole decided to reckon with those wrongs.
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Engaging Culture From Ahead, Not From Behind – Samuel James, Letter & Liturgy – In Western Christendom, one often hears a great deal about “engaging the culture”. This practice includes (but is not limited to) watching the same movies and TV shows as everyone else so that vaguely spiritual opinions can be generated about them, talking about the same subjects that everyone else is talking about with vaguely Christian overtones, and buying Testamints. This is a reactionary way of dealing with the world; what if churches were instead dealing with real cultural issues in such a way to get people talking?
- Kate Bowler: Why Christian Women Become Celebrity ‘Influencers’ – Karen Swallow Prior, Christianity Today – “Evangelicals are what they buy.” This interview with Kate Bowler explores her new book on evangelical women and the ways that they navigate the challenging norms of complementarian theology with therapeutic language of "messiness". It's chock-full of insights about ways in which the culture is being engaged from behind.
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