In spending time with the elderly and others of those most at risk in my community at the vaccination site, I have come to see better the preciousness of life in its essential vulnerability. To live without this awareness is to deaden oneself to the sense of what is worth fearing and what is worth daring.
Featured
Words and Flesh: Pastoring in a Post-truth World
Kurt Armstrong
There is weight and meaning in the words we use. Words can be used to manipulate, mislead, wound, deceive, and abuse—but words can also tell the truth.
Taking It Outside
John Clair
Suddenly it seems everyone would rather simply “take it outside.” We saw these images in almost every city and town in America. Images of violence in exchange or action, splattered across the national news in waves not seen in decades. A key job of the police, and one that other citizens are less well-equipped to do, is to do what people don’t have the time or temperament or training to do when they are in a mood to take it outside. That is to find out what actually happened: to investigate.
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.
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.
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?
We, the People . . .
Mack McCarter
This was written four years ago, in January 2017, as part of Mack McCarter’s “weekly word” to the global community of those committed to renewing our relationships from the foundations on out. We thought it appropriate to re-post today, on this Inaugural week in the States.
From Revelation to Imagination
Anne Snyder
If June to December was a time to try to make sense of truths we were seeing, truths too long veiled beneath the hum of “normal,” 2021 will be a time for mapping a way forward.
The Skill of Hospitality
L.M. Sacasas
In this reflection on the thought of Ivan Illich, L.M. Sacasas writes that there can be no substitute for the work of rediscovering our common humanity in the practice of hospitality, which, insofar as it flowers into friendship, will be the starting point of politics.
A Tale of Two Evangelicalisms
Joel Halldorf
How can those whose theology and spirituality are so similar hold such widely different political opinions? Swedish public theologian Joel Halldorf compares and contrasts the history of faith and politics in the United States and Sweden.