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Jul 20, 2024 | 
ncronline.org | Elizabeth Schrader Polczer |Thomas Reese |Michael Sean Winters
Mary of Bethany and Jesus are depicted in stained glass in Saint-Pierre de Neuilly Church in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France (Wikimedia Commons/Reinhardhauke) This week the church celebrates the feast of Mary Magdalene, at a time when Catholicism finds itself in a definitive moment concerning the roles of women. In May, the first-ever deaconess was ordained in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
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May 8, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Kat Armas |Melissa Florer-Bixler |Benjamin Dueholm |Elizabeth Schrader Polczer
“I haven’t read a devotional in years,” Kat Armas confesses in the first line of her new devotional book. I rarely finish a devotional, although I buy and start them regularly. Still, I devoured Sacred Belonging in a couple of days instead of taking the recommended 40.
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May 8, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Melissa Florer-Bixler |Benjamin Dueholm |Elizabeth Schrader Polczer |Isaac S. Villegas
(Source image: Kateryna Kovarzh / iStock / Getty) I grew up with two languages, with my mind shifting back and forth. We spoke English at home because my parents wanted my sister and me to be proficient in the dominant idiom of this new country. However, every day my mom would drop me off with my Costa Rican grandparents while she went to work. While my grandfather had learned enough English to run his bicycle shop, my grandmother spoke only Spanish. Her idioma tica became my other home.
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May 7, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Melissa Florer-Bixler |Benjamin Dueholm |Elizabeth Schrader Polczer |Richa Karmarkar
On May 4, some 40 New York City rabbis and synagogue staff received the same chilling email in their inboxes: “I have set a bomb in your building. You have a few hours to disarm, or else blood will shatter everywhere.”“I have talked about this for a long time with my community,” said Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, one of the synagogues addressed in the email. “We plan for all this. We have protocols in place and we have increased security.
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May 3, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Katherine Willis Pershey |Melissa Florer-Bixler |Elizabeth Schrader Polczer |Kathryn Reklis
Early in the first episode of the latest season of Fargo (created by Noah Hawley), Dorothy “Dot” Lyons (Juno Temple) fights off attackers who have broken into her home. After she retreats upstairs, we watch the attackers follow a strand of yarn that she seems not to have realized is leading them straight to her hiding place. It turns out the yarn is a lure, not a trail, and we are just as surprised as the attackers to discover what waits on the other end.
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May 3, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Katherine Willis Pershey |Elizabeth Schrader Polczer |Benjamin Dueholm
I’m not new here. I know full well that preachers and writers are never supposed to cast themselves in the role of Jesus. It’s the most off-putting mistake an interpreter of the gospel can make. Still, I am going to break the rules to admit that lately, when I read Luke’s account of the ascension, I can’t help but relate to the Son of God. Not in the manner of a messiah complex; thankfully I’m not that far gone.
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May 3, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Katherine Willis Pershey |Melissa Florer-Bixler |Elizabeth Schrader Polczer |Heather Hahn
The United Methodist Church’s condemnation of homosexuality—which sparked a half-century of conflict—is now no more. By a vote of 523 to 161 after about an hour and a half of debate, general conference delegates eliminated on Thursday the 52-year-old assertion in the denomination’s Social Principles that “the practice of homosexuality . . .
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May 1, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Katherine Willis Pershey |Elizabeth Schrader Polczer |Samuel Wells |Jonathan Tran
Christians sometimes say that hell is locked from the inside. What they mean is that people put themselves in hell, and only they can let themselves out. I recently encountered something like this. I was attending the trial of a woman accused of killing a college student in a hit-and-run accident seven years earlier. The young man she killed lived in the residential college I directed at the time. Her defense was that she didn’t do it, or if she did, she doesn’t remember it.
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May 1, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Katherine Willis Pershey |Elizabeth Schrader Polczer |Samuel Wells |Yonat Shimron
United Methodists meeting for their top legislative assembly May 1 overwhelmingly overturned a measure that barred gay clergy from ordination in the denomination, a historic step for the nation’s second-largest Protestant body. With a simple vote call and without debate, delegates to the general conference removed the ban on the ordination of “self-avowed practicing homosexuals”—a prohibition that dates to 1984.
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Apr 30, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Austin Shelley |Elizabeth Schrader Polczer |Samuel Wells
Welcome to Madang. Madang is the outdoor living room of the world. Here we invite you to sit and tune into unreserved, remarkable conversations with renowned authors, leaders, public figures, and scholars of religion, culture, and everything in between. Madang has been a dream of mine for many years, and now it is a reality. Here in the 39th episode, I converse with Rev.
