“This will not kill you,” he would repeat with wonder, as he watched the sky on fire. “You will not die.”
The Home Is the School
Mary Townsend
Is Aristotle a person, or is he a subject that you study?” This is a question from my youngest son, a star, a tap-dancer, almost eight, standing beside me in our living room as I conduct a Zoom class for my undergraduates. He’s become proficient at Zoom over the last...
What is Community?
Seth Kaplan
Community as an ideal gets thrown around a lot these days, but fewer and fewer are experiencing it. It tends to get conflated with “sense of community,” which can emanate from friendships and certain kinds of social networks, the experience of working with a dedicated...
Work After the Pandemic
Heather Zeiger
For many Americans work is the be-all and end-all. The pandemic has forced us to come face-to-face with our dysfunctional relationship with work and in the process re-introduced many of us to the idea of leisure.
The Anabaptist Vision of Politics
John Roth
John D. Roth reflects on why history’s meaning stems from the church, not the state.
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.”
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.