Icebergs, famously, have 90 percent of their mass below water. The largest modern cruise ships almost perfectly reverse that ratio, with 88 percent of their height above the waterline. Being a public person—someone who is recognized by people who do not actually know...
Month: November 2020
Solidarity Means Giving Yourself
Sister Dominic Mary Heath
“I am feeling confused right now about what I want to give my neighbor.” A letter from a friend captured the feelings of many Americans this spring. This was back when “the Head Cheetah” – the only name I’ve heard her use for President Donald Trump that could also be...
The Interim God
Eberhard Arnold
“…However sharp their differences, this is the one thing that should unite all political factions, Christians and non-Christians: the inner certainty that everything must be completely different, that what destroys solidarity and shatters trust will in the end be overcome by joy in life and fellowship in justice. For the faith we hold is in a living God.”
The Lord’s Descent into Hell
In a kind of political Holy Saturday as this week has been, it’s worth returning to the office of readings for the real one each year. “Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled.”
Banquet of Love
Bill DeJong
“The Lord’s Supper is not only a taste of God’s love to nourish us; it’s also a banquet of God’s love to unite us.
There ought to be no rank at the Lord’s Supper, no hierarchy, no divisions. At the Lord’s Supper there aren’t employers and employees or teachers and students. There aren’t even husbands and wives, or parents and children. There’s only one category—believers, brothers and sisters.”
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
Martin Luther King, Jr.
“…Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement, and pray that our inner being may be sensitive to its guidance. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us…”
What to an Immigrant Is the Third of November?
Dhananjay Jagannathan
A nationalism rooted in values encourages us to be fierce in our opposition to injustices that lie outside our immediate gaze. It tends to foster fellow-feeling beyond the bonds of immediate affinity. It gives us orientation when difficult political questions face us, while also inspiring us to reject the politics of friend and enemy.
Observations of a New Citizen
Irena Dragaš Jansen
As 2020’s contentious election season builds to a climax, a former resident of the Communist eastern bloc, newly an American citizen, reflects on her political journey, one that traces the travails of Christianity’s own courtship of political cynicism.
Wrestling with Sovereignty in a Kairos Year
Amy Julia Becker
In late April, crowds of people gathered at the Pennsylvania statehouse to protest stay-at-home measures taken in response to the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Parked out front of the capital was the cab of a dark green 18-wheeler with the words “Jesus is my vaccine”...