John D. Roth reflects on why history’s meaning stems from the church, not the state.
Month: August 2020
When Place Becomes Paramount
Joe Nail, Benya Kraus
“Home” strikes a million chords for each of us: familiarity, pain, loss, roots that go deeper than words. But what happens when a country’s young people choose to return in loving commitment to the place that bore them, believing that their matured agency might come back to help nourish a future for the “forgotten” places?
A Living Memory
Yishai Schwartz
There is a temptation to ignore or minimize the difficult elements of our religious traditions. But when we wrestle with them, as Yishai Schwartz does with the paradoxical commands to the Israelites to both remember and forget, what we discover may enrich our understanding.
Community Resilience in the Wake of Trauma
Lewis Powell, Richard Yale
On November 8, 2018, a massive fire was triggered in northern California and decimated the town of Paradise and surrounding mountain communities in less than half a day. Nearly two years later, as the nation grapples with urgent questions around community resilience in the wake of trauma, two pastoral figures from the area, Richard Yale and Lew Powell, reflect on mission, relationalism, and the civic responsibilities of the church.
The Hollow Lands, Part II
Andrew Wainer
“In the end, local solutions—multiplied by thousands—can become national solutions—if they are allowed to trickle up. It might be that the healing that will come will begin quietly, unspectacularly, when more people refuse to give up and move on even when that’s the reasonable thing to do; even in places the world doesn’t know exist: places like the hollows of these mountains.”
Attention
Susannah Black
If, in January, we thought that we had transcended the limits of our physicality, we know better than that now. All of the things that we’ve been doing to keep each other safe from the COVID-19 virus have been things that acknowledge our bodies: we wash our hands, we...
The Hollow Lands, Part I
Andrew Wainer
The escape to Joara was perhaps the first recorded instance of fugitives using Appalachia as a hiding place from hostile outside authority. For centuries more, the mountains would serve as a refuge for those fleeing authority – first native Americans, and then white colonial and American settlers. Almost five hundred years later, the Appalachian distrust of outside authority persists.
The Bruderhof and the State
John Huleatt
November 1933, Hesse, Germany. The Bruderhof, a community of about 125 men, women, and children recently established on a farm in the Rhön Mountains, had just learned of a new mandate from the National Socialist government: all citizens must vote in a referendum to...
The Holy Trinity, Race, and a Time of Crisis
Ken Herfst
Our societies are in the middle of a crisis. The pandemic is asking us to think about what it means to be human living in community—not only with other people but also with the rest of creation, including animals—especially if it’s true that the virus originated from...
Pick the Right Politics
Peter Mommsen
For those afflicted, it has all the compulsiveness of a guilty habit: repeatedly scanning news headlines; experiencing mood swings based on the latest polling data; responding to scandals, epidemics, or Wall Street gyrations by first wondering how it will affect the...