Fleming Rutledge

2 weeks ago | christiancentury.org | Mac Loftin |David Dault |Fleming Rutledge |Mark Glanville

They “stood at a distance, watching.” This detail in Luke’s Gospel haunts me: how Jesus’ friends and followers, including the women who have journeyed with him from Galilee, can do nothing but witness his suffering from afar. The sense of powerlessness they must feel, maybe even shame, is something we all have perhaps experienced at one moment or another. Today, we have more access than ever to witness atrocities. What does one do with such powerlessness?

2 weeks ago | christiancentury.org | Mac Loftin |David Dault |Fleming Rutledge |Mark Glanville

A federal judge has dismissed a gender discrimination lawsuit brought against Abyssinian Baptist Church by a onetime candidate to be the historic Harlem church’s senior pastor, the sole female candidate among finalists for the role. Eboni Marshall Turman, an associate professor at Yale Divinity School, filed the complaint in 2023.

3 weeks ago | christiancentury.org | Mac Loftin |David Dault |Fleming Rutledge |Mark Glanville

In her charming introduction to this anthology, US poet laureate Ada Limón suggests that poems and trees “let us breathe together.” This comment calls to mind priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “God’s Grandeur,” which notes a rejuvenating spirit infusing the world—“nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things”—as well as Jesuit theologian and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s phrase “the breathing together of all things.” The anthology subtitle’s...

3 weeks ago | christiancentury.org | Mac Loftin |David Dault |Fleming Rutledge |Mark Glanville

On April 4, 1968, hours before his assassination, from room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. phoned the office at Ebenezer Baptist Church back home in Atlanta.

3 weeks ago | christiancentury.org | Mac Loftin |David Dault |Fleming Rutledge |Samuel Wells

Feminist biblical scholarship, once relegated to the sidelines, is now solidly mainstream. Each year, more books, podcasts, and documentaries emerge to challenge the traditional patriarchal readings of the Bible and offer liberatory alternatives. Within such a landscape, it can be hard for a new book to stand out. But Eve Isn’t Evil is a gift.