In his inaugural address, President Biden called for unity, quoting St. Augustine as he did so. What, in the face of an astonishingly divided country, can we hope for? Is it possible—is it even desirable—to seek unity? “Harmony makes me nervous,” said Brookings...
Month: January 2021
Relativism Is Out. Truth Is In.
Brandon McGinley
Truth is in, and that’s good. It’s much better for Christians, and for everyone, for the terms of discourse to be made clear, rather than obscured behind the false neutrality of skepticism and relativism and tolerance. But if we try to contain truth within American political categories, just as when we try to tame Christ and his teachings, we will continue to do violence to it, and to him.
Gospel Fasting
Dan MacDonald
Dan MacDonald explains that true fasting is a fasting of selfishness and comfort, sacrificing for the sake of those who need it.
God is Speaking – But Are We Ready to Listen?
Bishop Robert Barron
We need to work to discern his call through our deafness and the noise of our culture. God is not one voice among many, but a hidden and mysterious voice that is difficult to discern even in the best of conditions. We are called to listen closely for God’s voice and to look for the modern-day Samuels.
Jesus and the Disinherited
Howard Thurman
Thurman states that the family is an even better place to find the means to build personal and spiritual dignity and understand the common dignity of others. The whole human race is the family of God and wealth, status, health did not matter to Jesus. When the Gospel of Jesus is preached to all people it becomes a vehicle for social change.
Keep Doing It
Rachel Ringenberg Miller
Rachel Ringenberg Miller, pastor of Shalom Mennonite Church in Newton, KS, offers an encouragement that the ethic of Jesus is an ongoing labor of love in the world, and that voting patterns are not the first or final word for Christian discipleship.
Biden’s Augustinian Call for Concord
Michael Lamb
Politics should not seek a totalizing uniformity that dominates those who are different, but a humble harmony that gives justice to all, welcomes others into community, and forges unity in plurality.
Is Unity Possible?
What makes political authority legitimate? How is it perceived as legitimate? These two questions are at the center of what we’ve been considering at Breaking Ground for the past few weeks, because they’re at the center of what it means to have a transition of power,...
Building Our Commons
Father Jack Wall, Joe Boland
How might we imagine and actually each play a role in building a more woven, widely shared commons? A commons committed to solidarity and humbly receptive to repair. One that keeps human dignity front and center and sees all of life as gift. How could each of us and each of the societal sectors that touch our lives and that we touch in turn—education, medicine, business, social service, law, media, politics, the institutional church, and more—how could we and all these shift, perhaps softly in some ways, perhaps dramatically in others, to sow a better normal?
One Nation, Sinful Under God
Shadi Hamid
So many of us have felt dread, that inchoate sense that something isn’t quite right: not with our politics nor our country nor even, perhaps, our own souls. We don’t often have the language for that thing, whatever it is, but the inability to give that something a...