Last Friday night, my seven-year-old son and I were on our way to say his bedtime prayers when we heard loud voices and saw police lights outside his bedroom. I looked out the window, and immediately an image was seared on my brain. An image of a person I will likely...
Justice
Leadership in Uncertain Times
Ed O'Malley
Uncertainty reigns. The pandemic and associated economic strife define the era. We face collective questions: What do we value most? What is the connection between health and the economy? Personal questions are ever present too. Should I attend the funeral? Should we...
Observations of a New Citizen
Irena Dragaš Jansen
As 2020’s contentious election season builds to a climax, a former resident of the Communist eastern bloc, newly an American citizen, reflects on her political journey, one that traces the travails of Christianity’s own courtship of political cynicism.
Politics at the End of the World
Onsi Kamel
All earthly happiness is precarious. Yet, as Augustine wrote, rather than filling us with despair, this should free us to reckon honestly with the world as it is while simultaneously persevering within it.
You’re Not Being Persecuted for Your Beliefs
Susannah Black
Six months ago, as the pandemic spread across America, mayors and governors ordered the closure of many places where members of the public come together in proximity—including, of course, churches. Are these restrictions sensible and appropriate, coming from those...
Is God Anti-racist?
Amy Julia Becker
When it comes to the social divisions of our time, rather than baptizing either the fervent individualism of the right or the punishing collectivism of the left, is the American church capable of offering a different kind of answer altogether? If not, what muscles need strengthening—and then healing—so that we can?
A Time to Rend, A Time to Sew
Anne Snyder
The pages of Ecclesiastes have often flipped hastily under my thumb, Solomon’s more fatalistic thoughts unnerving to a soul seeking to understand God’s patterns, not more reminders of our own. But the much-popularized passage in chapter 3—“To everything there is a...
Deep Solidarity
Emmanuel Katongole
Jake Meador: Let’s get right into a topic you’ve written about recently: why violence and corruption continue to plague so many countries in Africa. In your book The Sacrifice of Africa, you argue that the reason for this is not the failure of the nation-state in...
Portland: On the Ground
Patrick Tomassi
“Liberal friends wondered if we were being rounded up by the Gestapo. Conservative friends wanted to know if Antifa were burning our houses down. I decided to see for myself.” One Portland native’s account of the city’s summer of struggle – and the moral messiness of policing, protests, riots, and responses.
Trying to Find the Good Together
Susannah Black
Dear Friends, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know: we’re living through a time of what is for many of us unprecedented civil unrest, sparked by the killing of George Floyd, and embroiled with the complex and weighty history of racism and policing in America....