Offended by Forgiveness After the 2014 deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City, a new movement for racial justice emerged, especially embodied by a new loose network called Black Lives Matter. “This ain’t your grandfather’s...
Introspection
A Time to Break Down, and a Time to Build Up
Roger Mielke
In Berlin’s Zehlendorf district, there is a subway station named “Onkel Toms Hütte,” after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe, an ardent abolitionist, wrote the novel in 1852 as a manifesto against slavery. Twenty-two-year-old Berlin pro...
The Turning Point
Carlo Lancellotti
We find ourselves, in the United States at the end of a global pandemic, in a society that is increasingly isolating, and with increasing alienation between classes: economic classes, and political and cultural classes as well. How did this society of profound anti-solidarity come to be, and how can it be healed, if it can? Carlo Lancellotti addresses these questions in this essay.
The Call to Own
Gregory Thompson, Duke Kwon
What would reparations look like if the church led the way?
The Case for Meekness
Peter Mommsen
From all the losses of the last year, with its countless ordeals and heartbreaks, let’s pick out one that may seem an abstraction. It’s the loss of a once-sturdy taboo. At some point between George Floyd’s killing on May 25 and the invasion of the US Capitol on...
A Return to Wisdom
Susannah Black
Dear Friends, When you love learning, there are things you remember: the first time you became consumingly curious, the first time you wondered and tried to find out. You probably remember a teacher, too, who seemed to know things that you didn’t, who had the skill to...
With Love We Shall Force Our Brothers
Anthony Barr
When I was a little boy, I had two answers to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” A preacher, I said, or a police officer. Sometimes I said I would be both. Both aspirations lasted for perhaps as much as a decade of my life. Neither occupation runs in my...
Peacemaking Is Political
Stanley Hauerwas
Plough: Stanley, you’re a Christian ethicist – what makes Christian ethics Christian? Stanley Hauerwas: Jesus. P: Yes, Jesus. But which Jesus? SH: It is the Jesus of the Gospels that makes Christian ethics Christian. Of course, part of the difficulty of contemporary...
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.