Some of us might hesitate to call our present moment apocalyptic, but it is. An apocalypse is an unveiling, and we should expect many apocalypses to rock our world before the end of all things. Some of these apocalypses can be filled with grace, even as others unveil many dark corners of our nation.
Month: November 2020
God Has Heard
Joshua Bombino, Chelsea Langston Bombino
This has been a year of ambiguous grief. How do we situate ourselves within the experience of loss, personal and communal, when it feels like that loss slouches toward nothing? Here is an offering for those who mourn. It is a timeline, a gallery of grief and hope in dialectic.
The Politics of Friendship and Thanksgiving
Susannah Black
This year’s Thanksgiving is a strange one: it comes amid what continues to feel like a penitential season, both because of COVID and because of America’s ongoing reckoning with its own past, and with its future together. COVID had originally seemed to me as though it...
Politics Strike Back: Survival in a Pandemic
Jake Meador
The flourishing of individuals is premised on relationships of mutual care and fidelity that radiate outward. COVID-19 exposes the death of our current order and calls us back to that mutual love, writes Jake Meador.
The Complicated Grief of Advent
Heidi Deddens
One of my favorite Advent hymns is “O Come O Come Emmanuel”—though for much of my life, I must admit, that love stemmed more from the haunting beauty of the melody than the rich meaning of its lyrics. This year, though, the words feel particularly apt. The first verse...
“And lo, I am with you always…”
Pope John Paul II
“We know how history flows on earth, how far we can go [in understanding that history] with the help of our cognitive methods. …We know a lot. We know ever more. At times even that which we know can hinder us in perceiving that which is most important. We know too how history has flowed in our fatherland within the limits of one millennium of history, already after Christ. Already within the limits of what St. Paul called “the fullness of time” (Galatians 4:4). We know that in our century resistance and opposition against Him who “so loved the world” has risen—opposition and resistance that extends to a negation of God. To programmatic atheism. But none of this can change the fact of Christ. The fact of the Eucharist. No matter how much God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is rejected by people. No matter if people and societies govern their lives by ignoring God, as if God did not exist. No matter how far negation and sin goes. None of this changes the basic fact: there was and there continues to be in the history of mankind—and in the history of the universe—a Man, a true Son of Man, who “loved to the end.” He loved God with a love that is worthy of God, like a Son for a Father. Love above everything, with all His heart and all His soul, with all His strength, all the way to its ultimate depletion in the agony of Golgotha. . . . That man, Jesus Christ, is a “sign of opposition.” But no matter how far that opposition towers over human heart in history, in the history of societies and world-views, His love “to the end” remains human. And that is the love of redemption. That is the love of salvation. . . .”
Toward a Theology of Race, Part 1
Stuart McAlpine
How does one do good biblical exegesis on race? Pastor Stuart McAlpine of Christ Our Shepherd Church in Washington, DC has recently begun a three-part series called “Towards a Theology of Race,” the entirety which we will be publishing here. Here is Part I. An excerpt: “We must have an understanding of the roots of present bad cultural fruit. The self-professing church has a responsibility to take the untruthful consequences of Scripture being manipulated. It was not by cultural norms that the church justified racism, but by the very scriptures that our authors say that our understanding of sin is based upon. …We will not deal effectively and redemptively with social and racial personal inequalities if there is no conviction about spiritual equality in creation, equality in our sin, and equality in our salvation and deliverance. The manipulation of Christian faith by Christless religion had a long history before a year like 1619, and before the next stage of our national, theological conspiracy.”
The Living Word
Ulrich Stadler
“Whoever therefore would use the Scripture according to its true worth, whoever does not want to give more to it than belongs to it and is due to it, must sharply distinguish Scripture, as well as the spoken word, from the inward Word of the heart.”
When He Came to Himself
Dr. Gardner C. Taylor
A brother demanding his possession he had not worked for but felt he was due because of his Father’s work. After spending all his inheritance, he came to himself.
Leadership in Uncertain Times
Ed O'Malley
Uncertainty reigns. The pandemic and associated economic strife define the era. We face collective questions: What do we value most? What is the connection between health and the economy? Personal questions are ever present too. Should I attend the funeral? Should we...