“We are in a battle for the soul of this nation,” said Joseph Biden while racing toward his final showdown with Donald Trump last year. The pronouncement turned heads, his invocation of an ancient philosophical concept crashing into a heated public reckoning...
The Horror of Nursing Homes
Charles Camosy
What has the pandemic revealed about how we treat the elderly and disabled?
Where Our Hope Truly Lies
Susannah Black
Dear friends, How can Christians best participate in political life? In one of this week’s pieces, Zachary McCartney and Ben Peterson make a richly considered and theologically grounded case for the church as the archetypal polis: the political community of which all...
My Father’s Resurrection: A Funeral Homily
Trevor Bechtel
One of my father’s favorite small adventures involves a peacock. One day about 75 years ago, his sister Janet came to get him to let him know that their peacock, Birdy, had been attacked by a dog, and was dying. George carefully collected Birdy and set him in some...
The Impassable Gulf (The Parable of Dives and Lazarus)
Martin Luther King, Jr.
King uses Jesus’ parable to convince his listeners that the disparity between fortune and misfortune is unjust and that they should work to bridge that gap. He charges that “Dives is the white man who refuses to cross the gulf of segregation and lift his Negro brother to the position of first class citizenship, because he thinks segregation is a part of the fixed structure of the universe.”
Make Me Pure of Heart
Karl Barth
When Barth preached this sermon, he lived in troubled times. Our time, too, is one of trouble, albeit a different kind of trouble. As Barth reminds his listeners, trouble can lead to despondency: where ought we turn? We turn, he proclaims, to the God who helps. “God helps” is a truth that is both certain and practical. In all times, and all places, he is King, and he hears the weary. In the time where we “see only our affication and our sins . . . there and just there we shall see God.”
The Virtue of Charity
Pope Leo I
INTRODUCTION In times when corruption is rampant, institutions are crumbling around you, and danger is an ever present companion, Pope Leo the Great’s message is to remember charity as the truly Christian response. During the 5th century, Leo is supposed to have gone...
The Roots of Our Anti-Solidarity Culture
Susannah Black
Dear friends, We find ourselves, in the United States, at the end of a global pandemic in a society that is increasingly isolating. We've all experienced this over the last year: we have been trapped behind our screens in our pods. With that isolation has come...
Account
Peter Riedemann
We acknowledge also Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God We have said and acknowledge it is one, and apart from him there is none that remains of himself unchanging in his clarity and who lives for ever; for he is truth, and that is his name in all eternity....
Rediscovering Lost Values
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Preached at Second Calvary Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan in 1954